Transforming the sales experience during a period of rapid growth — replacing a fragmented, multi-tab workflow with an iconic, seamless, AI-powered interface that sales professionals would actually choose to use.
Client
CrowdStrike / Salesforce
My Role
Lead UX Consultant
Domain
Enterprise SaaS · Cybersecurity
Year
2023
Tools
Figma · Miro · UserTesting
Overview
CrowdStrike, the Austin-based cybersecurity leader, was scaling its sales organization aggressively. The problem was that their Salesforce Sales Cloud experience had not evolved at the same pace as the company's growth — leaving sales teams navigating a fragmented, unintuitive platform that slowed productivity and frustrated the people responsible for hitting those numbers.
As Lead UX Consultant embedded with the Salesforce design team, I was tasked with designing an experience that would become a competitive differentiator internally — an iconic, seamless, and intelligent sales platform that professionals would actually want to use every day.
The Challenge
CrowdStrike's sales reps were spending more time wrestling with their tools than selling. The Salesforce platform, configured over years of incremental changes, had become a patchwork of disconnected workflows, redundant data entry, and unclear information hierarchies.
Fragmented workflows — Sales reps toggled between multiple tabs to complete a single customer interaction, losing context at every step and losing hours of selling time each day.
Low platform adoption — Without an intuitive experience, reps kept critical deal information outside Salesforce in spreadsheets and email, making pipeline data unreliable and forecasting inaccurate.
No AI leverage — The platform was not utilizing available AI capabilities to surface next-best actions, flag at-risk deals, or automate low-value data entry — a significant missed opportunity in a data-rich sales environment.
Accessibility gaps — Existing screens failed WCAG 2.1 color contrast requirements and had inconsistent keyboard navigation, creating barriers for sales team members with visual or motor disabilities.
Research
Before touching a wireframe, I needed to deeply understand how CrowdStrike's sales professionals actually worked — not how the system assumed they worked. I led a structured research program spanning three weeks.
Moderated interviews with sales reps, managers, and SDRs across deal stages — enterprise, mid-market, and SMB.
Shadowed sales reps during live customer calls and pipeline reviews to observe real tool usage patterns and workarounds.
Constructed future-state journey maps for 5 distinct user personas representing the full spectrum of sales roles and behavioral patterns.
Systematic audit of the existing Salesforce screens against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, documenting and ranking every distinct pain point.
Analyzed Salesforce usage telemetry to identify drop-off points, most-used features, and features that were technically available but never touched.
Moderated usability sessions with existing users on current-state tasks, establishing baseline performance metrics for comparison.
Key Insights
Insight 01
"I have the data — I just can't find it fast enough." Speed and findability were more critical than any new feature. Reps needed fewer clicks to get to the information they already had.
Insight 02
"I trust my spreadsheet more than Salesforce." Platform credibility was broken — reps maintained parallel systems because they didn't trust the data in CRM to be accurate or current.
Insight 03
"I'd love AI that helps me prioritize, not just summarize." Reps were open to AI assistance but wanted it to be actionable — telling them what to do next, not just restating what they already knew.
Insight 04
New reps (< 6 months) struggled significantly with onboarding to the platform, extending time-to-productivity by weeks — a hidden cost the business had underestimated.
Design Process
With clear research findings in hand, I structured the design process around three guiding pillars: establish an innovation-focused mindset, define an experience foundation for consistency and efficiency, and deliver a simple, intuitive interface for successful adoption.
Deep research, persona development, and journey mapping to align the team on who we were designing for and why.
Synthesized research into a prioritized problem space — pain points ranked by frequency, severity, and business impact.
Facilitated design sprints, sketching sessions, and concept critiques to explore the full solution space before narrowing.
High-fidelity Figma prototypes, tested in moderated sessions. Iterated three rounds based on user feedback before final handoff.
Design Decisions
Three design decisions had the greatest measurable impact on adoption and task efficiency:
Unified Deal Workspace — Consolidated the multi-tab workflow into a single-pane deal view with contextual panels, reducing average task completion time by bringing all relevant data into one coherent view.
AI-Powered Next Best Actions — Surfaced intelligent recommendations (follow-up timing, deal health scores, at-risk flags) directly in the deal view, making AI assistance feel natural rather than bolted on.
Accessibility-First UI System — Rebuilt the component library with WCAG 2.1 AA color contrast, full keyboard navigation, ARIA labeling, and focus management — creating a more inclusive experience for all users.
The Screens
The screens below are the Front Line Manager flow — one of several role-tailored dashboards in the redesign. It is a single console shell with five tabs, and it is the clearest expression of the core idea: rather than sending a manager to six separate destinations, give them one place that changes lens without losing their filter context, their territory, or their place.
These are dense analytics surfaces. Select any screen to open it full-size, then scroll, pinch, or use the zoom controls — the counters, thresholds and colour coding carry the argument, and none of it survives being shrunk.
The manager's default lens. Ten counters sit above the fold, and the entire second row is exceptions — churn risk, red-status accounts, escalated cases, missed QBRs. The first question the screen answers is “where is my team off track”, not “how did we do”.
Same shell, different lens. The top row reports outcomes; the second row reports only exceptions — past close date, missing MEDDICC qualification, missing partner, at risk. Separating the two means a manager never has to hunt for the problems inside the scoreboard.
Forecasting needs more control than account review does, so the filter bar expands here — stage, record type, status and a close-date range join the base filters. Quota attainment reads amber against a green forecast-to-quota, so the gap between where the team is and where it is heading resolves in one glance.
The most unusual screen in the set. An account-by-product matrix where the answer lives in the empty cells, not the filled ones — every gap is a product an existing customer has not bought yet. Inverting the usual “show me what I have” dashboard turns the same data into a prospecting list.
The filter bar disappears entirely here, because nothing on this tab is filterable by territory or product. The chrome is not persistent for its own sake — each lens carries only the controls that change what it shows, which is why five tabs never start to feel like five different products.
Impact
Post-launch feedback and usability metrics showed improvement across every key dimension of the sales experience:
Adoption climbed measurably in the first two months. Reps who had been avoiding the platform started using it as their primary surface — the clearest signal that the redesign had removed enough friction to change behaviour rather than just appearance.
Core tasks got materially faster. Pipeline updates, deal reviews and follow-up logging all shortened once the single-pane workspace removed the tab-switching that had been fragmenting every interaction.
CRM data quality improved as the workarounds stopped. Reps began entering deal information directly instead of maintaining parallel spreadsheets — which meant pipeline data and forecasting became trustworthy for the first time.
The component library passed accessibility standards. Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA labelling and focus management were rebuilt to WCAG 2.1 AA — the first time these screens had met the standard.
Key Learnings
Speed of access beats breadth of features. Sales reps didn't need more capabilities — they needed faster paths to the ones they already had. This reinforced that UX strategy must start by mapping the task frequency-difficulty matrix before proposing new features.
Trust is a design problem. The parallel spreadsheet behavior wasn't laziness — it was a rational response to an unreliable system. Rebuilding trust required both design changes and a clear communication strategy around data reliability.
AI feels natural when it reduces work, not adds to it. The most successful AI integration happened when it eliminated a manual step the user was already doing — not when it added a new interaction they had to learn.