David Klein

Every pixel counts

About

About

Design leader, mentor, rule of ⅓ photographer, coffee enthusiast

Photo taken by Kate Munsch at Tartine Manufactury

Design Leadership

I am a strategic and results-driven user experience designer and leader with 17 years of industry experience ranging from 3 person startups to enterprise companies. During my 7 years at Salesforce I have had opportunities to redesign applications, launch new products, and significantly increase the user engagement of numerous products. My strengths after 4 years of leading designers and people managers are:

  • Distill high level feedback and requirements into roadmaps, tasks, and effective designs that solve customer problems.
  • Build deep relationships with partners across disciplines including Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, and QA.
  • Unlock designers’ true potential to rapidly deliver high quality, simple designs.
  • Identify features to prioritize to solve customer problems.
  • Develop a strategy to implement a UX vision.

I am currently a Director of User Experience at Salesforce focusing on the AI Platform, Mobile, and Digital Wallet. As a leader I have led teams to deliver:

  • Einstein Copilot: A conversational AI across mobile and desktop that empowers every end user across Sales, Service, Commerce, Marketing, and more to get work done faster.
  • Prompt Builder: A tool for administrators to create, test, and customize prompt templates that safely incorporate CRM data.
  • Digital Wallet: An account management tool that offers near real-time usage data for consumption-based Salesforce products.
  • Mobile Offline: An offline-first app that gives users the ability to do their jobs from anywhere, including places with poor network connectivity.

Design Experience

As a Principal User Experience Designer I led an intiatiive to redesign the Mobile organization’s product development process by embracing the Horizon Framework to act more data-driven. I also delivered designs for Salesforce Mobile Home which allows end users to customize their landing pages with the most relevant data. This led to a 30% increase in customer engagement for the Salesforce Mobile App.

As a Lead User Experience Designer I completely redesigned and transitioned the Salesforce Mobile App into a platform. As a result customers can build on top of the mobile app to solve their specific business needs. This included extensively researching and prototyping new interaction and vidsual design paradigms in collaboration with Salesforce’s Chief Design Officer and Executive Vice President of the Lightning Platform. I was honored to present the final prototype to Bret Taylor, Salesforce’s previous co-CEO.

After introducing TestFlight into the development process and influencing the Engineering team to provide 2 engineers to work full time on building prototypes, the team successfully transitioned 2 million monthly active users and 100,000 companies to the new app. The redesign led to the app’s explosive growth to 1 million daily active users. Lastly, I had an incredible opportunity to closely collaborate with Apple’s enterprise team to implement the latest iOS functionality to the mobile app with an emphasis on Siri integrations.

To read about my experiences before joining Salesforce take a look at my LinkedIn profile.

Photography

Since my first digital camera, a tiny, 2 megapixel Canon S200, I have pursued taking the perfect photo. I am drawn to symmetry, patterns, minimalism, and, as mentioned above, the rule of thirds. These days I shoot with a Fujifilm X-T4, a Ricoh GR IIIx, and a Leica Sofort 2. I edit in Lightroom either on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS. If I’m satisfied with a photo I share on Instagram. If I’m proud of a photo I share on Unsplash.

In between the tiny Canon and the current mirrorless was a journey of curiosity. I had a Nikon DSLR, and a small, full-frame Sony. I was never satisfied. The Nikon was too heavy and bulky. The Sony was too limiting with its prime lens. I’m purposefully skipping over my Holga phase. Now, with a mirrorless camera, I feel a nice balance between size, weight, and performance. It’s important to note that I’m eyeing the Canon R6 when I feel tempted to switch systems.

This website

I’ve had many websites since college starting with a couple files on a friend’s server before hopping between LiveJournal, Tumblr, Hype, Squarespace, Jekyll, WordPress, and now Blot.im. Blot feels like a managed instance of Jekyll which is ideal for me. I grew frustrated managing gems and packages and servers before on Digital Ocean. Now I just edit text files that automatically sync to Blot through Dropbox. Easy.

I keep track of topics to write about in Things, edit CSS in Visual Studio Code, and write in iA Writer. To optimize images I use a combination of ImageOptim and JPEGmini Pro. My goal is to constantly read and think about design and tech, and post my thoughts here.

On the web

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Designed, researched, and written by David Klein, a designer you can rely on for coffee, comedy, and advice.