What Is a Salesforce Designer?

Salesforce helps more than 150,000 customers across myriad businesses, nonprofits, and institutions to connect with their customers. People around the world rely on our customer relationship management (CRM) platform to keep their businesses running.

So, what is a Salesforce Designer?

A Salesforce Designer is passionate about (and certified in) creating human-centered design (HCD) experiences on the Salesforce Platform. To do this, they use Relationship Design, a creative practice that drives social and business value by building strong relationships. People are at the heart of everything they do.

This role is for aspiring or experienced designers who want to build and design solutions — and, most importantly, for those who care about what matters most to a set of users.

Sound like you?

You might already be Salesforce-certified (as an admin, architect, developer, consultant, or marketer) and want to skill up. Or maybe you have a visual design, user experience (UX), or strategy background and now specialize in the Salesforce Platform.

As a Salesforce Designer, you use the insights you uncover through the design process. This leads to optimizing flows, interactions, and visual interfaces so that experiences built on the Salesforce Platform are intuitive.

What does a Salesforce Designer do?

Salesforce Designers lead with values front and center—building trust in every tool, experience, and service. They’re the type of people who love solving problems and designing solutions that serve both businesses and communities.

When you’re a Salesforce Designer, your day-to-day work begins with meeting users’ needs. From there, you strive to cut down complexity and align goals and vision across teams.

You achieve this by leading with an HCD mindset.

HCD is a creative approach to solving people’s problems. It begins with identifying their needs and ends with creating solutions to meet those needs. Sometimes, this looks like running user research programs. Other times, it means aligning strategic directions with business needs.

What kind of designer can I be?

As a Salesforce Designer, you can specialize in different areas of design—notably, UX design and strategy design.

UX designers craft digital experiences on and for the Salesforce Platform. They create detailed guidelines, flows, and specifications, which ensures that accessibility and inclusion are always taken into account. UX designers may also apply branding and styling to create a cohesive brand experience for customers.

The Salesforce Platform gives you many options here. Some experiences are entirely customized and others are built with clicks (not code) supported by the Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS). And, as you go, you test and iterate—often returning to the strategy design that kicked off a project.

Strategy designers analyze business and design requirements around the goals of design and gather stakeholder feedback for continuous improvement.

By nature, the design process is a collaborative one, so the role is, too. Salesforce Designers constantly partner with project teams, including admins, architects, developers, and executives. It’s what makes the job full of endless possibilities.

How do I become a Salesforce Designer?

When you’ve made the decision, there’s a clear path ahead for you. First, study for the UX Designer certification with the exam guide. And you don’t have to do it alone! You can collaborate and study with fellow Trailblazers in the Trailblazer Community.

Also, check out recommended self-study materials available on Trailhead—Salesforce’s free online learning platform.

Make sure these resources are at the top of your study list:

• Trailhead trailmix: Prepare for Your UX Designer Credential
• Trailhead trailmix: Salesforce Strategy Designer Career
• Trailhead module: Salesforce User Experience Designer Certification Prep

If you meet the credential experience, then we estimate it takes around 40 hours of study and preparation to pass the exam. When you’re ready, schedule your proctored exam either on-site at a testing center or online.

Career prospects and opportunities for Salesforce Designers

Hiring trends favor designers today. We’ve seen this at large inside the Salesforce ecosystem. Here are three reasons why the forecast is bright:

1. Design skills are in demand across industries.
   There’s a clear link between design and improved business outcomes. To tap into this opportunity, companies seek employees with design skills to navigate their evolving business landscape. Many teams are looking for experts with an intentional and iterative approach to innovation.
2. Design skills are in demand across most Salesforce roles.
   A 2019 report showed that at least one design skill was required in job postings across Salesforce roles including admins, architects, developers, and consultants.
3. Design skills are driving an increase in UX demand.
   In the last five years, the growth rate for UX designers has been 280%! This market has created an average annual UX designer salary of $112,000.

Which certifications are necessary for the job?

There are a few certification paths for Salesforce Designers that focus on specialized knowledge and skills.

• A Salesforce UX Designer optimizes flows, interactions, and visual interfaces for intuitive, human-centered experiences built on the Salesforce Platform.
• A Salesforce Strategy Designer engages system-level challenges, maps ecosystems, aligns stakeholders across organizations, and activates user insights for innovation.

Both certification paths also help you work with customers to determine their needs and requirements using HCD. With this background, you can deliver ethical, equitable, and sustainable experiences using the Salesforce Platform’s core features.

UX designer candidates should have:

• Baseline knowledge of how to problem-solve and design using core UX concepts.
• Six months of hands-on experience as a UX designer, engineer, administrator, stakeholder, facilitator, or researcher.
• Three to six months of experience applying UX design concepts on the Salesforce Platform.

Eager to get started? Start your designer journey today. Visit Salesforce Design, follow @SalesforceUX on Twitter, read up on the Salesforce Design Medium blog, and join our Trailblazer design community.