In 2021, Salesforce released a new User Experience Designer Certification. It’s such a departure from the rest of the certifications on offer, that Salesforce actually needed to introduce an entirely new certified professional persona, known as the Salesforce Designer. Rather than being mainly focused on in-application technical functionality, this certification looks at a product lifecycle end-to-end, with the development of “human-centered experiences” at the heart of the certification and associated Trailmix.
Where the certification does delve into Salesforce application functionality, some of the main themes it touches upon are around Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Salesforce Mobile App, Lightning Experience (LEX) and Flows. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a great certification for Pardot Consultants - and I’ve outlined below five reasons a Pardot consultant might want to tackle this cert.
1. A wider understanding of Sales Cloud & Lightning Functionality
Whilst this certification isn’t the heaviest in terms of Salesforce config, it focuses on some key concepts around Lightning Experience Productivity, which are super relevant to Pardot consultants working in-house or consultancy side. I’m a strong believer that the best Pardot consultants should be able to design effective Marketing-to-Sales handover processes, and the concepts related to this certification will ensure that you don’t just help your Marketing stakeholders “throw the Lead over the fence”, you’ll also be equipped to make things as efficient as possible for Sales agents to find, work and convert the Leads. The trailmix for this cert will set you up with a good understanding of how concepts such as Lightning Experience, Flows and Console apps help Sales agent productivity.
2. Apply Accessibile design concepts to build better Pardot assets
As a Pardot consultant, it’s easy to get into the habit of receiving briefs for assets such as Landing Pages and Email Templates, checking the technical feasibility of what you’re being asked to build, and then creating something as close as possible to the requirement. An important element of the User Experience Designer Cert is around how Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) can be applied to ensure that digital products can be operated by people with diverse capabilities. One of many examples given, is how HTML heading tags are vitally important for people who use screen readers in terms of navigation accessibility. There are also minimum contrast ratio requirements for webpage components such as input fields, text and backgrounds, and also guidelines around colour not being used in isolation to represent meaning. As a Pardot consultant, becoming familiar with these accessibility guidelines means that you can be a trusted advisor to end users to ensure that their Email Templates and Landing Pages conform to accessibility best practice.
3. Better project discovery
The certification doesn’t just focus on translating requirements into great user experiences; it starts right at the beginning of the process, where you’ll learn how to research problems for you to solve, gather actionable information from your users, build process maps and generate ideas and prototype solutions. All these are valuable, transferrable skills which can of course be applied to Salesforce projects, but would also add a ton of value to Pardot implementations too.
4. Adoption and testing
There’s also a large amount of focus around user adoption, training and enablement. Some of this content us leverages functionality within the Salesforce Lightning App, such as:
- Learning Paths and myTrailhead
- In-app Guidance
- Macros and Quick Text
- Sales Paths
On the other hand, much of the content is non-platform specific, and will help you pick up great Pardot insights on planning training programmes, implementation launch communications, and building winning training materials.