overview
Company
Salesforce
Role
Product Designer
Year
2025
Problem Statement
the opportunity
Data Capture forms help Technicians collect data during their work in the field with their mobile devices.
Filling forms was painful for Field Service technicians. Our solution allowed the technician to focus on the task at hand instead of spending valuable time filling out forms in the field. With a meaningful opportunity to make an impact ($200M in Annual Order Value across multiple industries), I’m grateful to have lead the design for Data Capture over three releases.
The Technician, also called the Frontline Worker, visits work sites or residential homes with specialized skills and equipment to perform service and needs to capture mission-critical data. Our research revealed that technicians spend 23% of their time on documentation, often forced to choose between completing work quickly and capturing accurate data for compliance. Additional pain points involved loss of data due to app-switching and connectivity issues.
🔧 The Field Service Technician
Data Capture customers span several industries including Public Sector, Automotive/Manufacturing, Utilities and Telecom, each with their own fleet of technicians who need to capture data in the field. Customers complained that their technicians had to switch between multiple apps, would lose progress or wouldn’t work in areas without internet.
Features I designed
Over the course of 10 months, I lead the design of the data capture team maintaining 30+ components and designing 9 features from scratch. Here are some highlights from some features I designed from the bottom up:
OCR lets technicians capture text straight from labels, meters, or equipment photos. Values are automatically detected and intuitively suggested for per field, reducing manual typing, minimizing errors, and speeding up form completion in the field.
how could field technicians use OCR?
National Grid’s technicians often captured serial numbers, meter readings, and label data under tight time pressure. Manual typing slowed them down and introduced errors. Technicians needed a faster, more reliable way to extract text from equipment.
OCR UX Pattern Audit
Before ideating, I wanted to collect a healthy spectrum of patterns showing how different apps in the market today approached the experience around OCR.
Ideation
Based on the best practices I researched for OCR, existing patterns that are similar within Salesforce and feedback that we had from validation meetings with our design partner National Grid, I prototyped different approaches. For each approach the pros and cons would be discussed along with that approach.
The OCR features helps Technicians to intelligently detect relevant text in an image, then breaks it into selectable values and automatically recommends the most likely entry for each field.
impact & takeaways
Testing different UX approaches led us to choose option #1 (text extracted to canvas) for the interim, until more resources could be dedicated to this feature
National Grid validated the feature through several pilot sessions
Upon testing, more performance testing was needed before developing this feature.
A sneak peak into a few more efforts I led during my time working on Data Capture.
lookup
Technicians lacked the ability to search for records (assets, products, parts) within forms, relying on manual, error-prone form responses. Success would be tracked by measuring the reduction in data errors by correlating an increase in Lookup component usage with a decrease in free-text entry for record names.
ar live capture (Vision Initiative)
Live Capture analyzes images or video in real time using AI, automatically identifying assets, asset information, hazards, and compliance issues so technicians can document sites faster, avoid mistakes, and ensure safer, more accurate field inspections.
ar scan (vision initiative)
AR Live Capture provides pertinent information on the fly, saving the technician the time needed to search for the asset, search for reference information and use details from that information in their current job form.
When I took ownership of Data Capture in early 2025, Data Capture lacked visual and interaction consistency, felt disjointed and difficult to scan.
It was time to establish a token-based design system. Over the next six months, I led the effort to create a consistent, scalable styling foundation that simplified implementation for engineers and ensured a more cohesive, polished experience for end users.
Aligning our naming “map”
A naming map helps to communicate what the naming structure of each token is and how each token should be used. After meeting with different teams across Salesforce, this is the map we ended up with.
A design review of the guidelines and their subsequent uses in real features was set with the dev team, who was incredibly supportive and proactive about using design tokens in Data Capture
Data Capture tokens allowed hundreds of sweeping adjustments to the overall experience of forms and their components, resulting in a much better user experience
50+ UX and UI bugs that we knew of were adjusted, across 4 teams
