The Salesforce Lightning Platform did not work on mobile, and mobile is critical for business. The team transformed the Salesforce Mobile App from a sales companion app to a mobile platform that customers can use for any job function in any industry.

The Salesforce Mobile App originally launched in 2013, years before I joined the company. When I arrived at Salesforce in 2017, I became the sole designer working alongside one product manager, one researcher, and dozens of engineers to redesign and rebuild the app to fully support the Lightning Platform and its refreshed Lightning Design System.

When the Lightning Platform launched, mobile had fallen behind. The new strategy was to reunite the mobile experience with the broader platform, allowing customers to access the custom applications and workflows they built using their CRM data on any device. This required rethinking the app's information architecture, delivering offline functionality for users in low or zero-connectivity environments, and ensuring visual and functional alignment with the desktop experience.

Through customer interviews, administrator feedback, and conversations with enterprise buyers, the team aligned on five key design goals:

• Customizable: Salesforce's greatest strength is its flexibility. Administrators needed the same power to tailor the mobile app for their end users' specific needs.
• Extendable: Just like on desktop, customers expected to build entire applications within Salesforce that solved unique business challenges.
• Unobtrusive: Our mantra was to stay out of the user's way so they could complete their work efficiently.
• Unopinionated: The design should not overemphasize Salesforce as a brand or product suite. Customers wanted an app that could blend seamlessly with their internal tools.
• Simple: Customers often described Salesforce as "hard to use," so we focused on simplifying navigation, search, and launch flows to make finding data faster and more intuitive.

Work towards a vision

When approaching a large, multi-year project, my goal as a design leader is to collaborate closely with cross-functional partners to define a clear long-term vision and then break it down into achievable milestones. At Salesforce, we aligned this work with the company's triannual release cadence, planning for an internal alpha, a customer-facing beta, a pilot, and finally a general availability release.

To ensure our vision remained grounded in customer needs, we invited customers into the process early and often. This included structured usability testing, feedback sessions, and extensive pilot programs. Over 1,000 customers participated in the pilot and open beta, providing valuable insight that directly influenced the app's evolution and helped validate our design decisions.

Tackling significant technical constraints

The Salesforce Mobile App was built as a hybrid experience combining native and webview interfaces. While this approach offered flexibility and reusability across platforms, it also introduced significant design and engineering challenges. Many of the core webview components, such as buttons, drill-ins, and complex ones like the Opportunity Path, were owned by other teams. To deliver a cohesive experience, we had to influence those teams to align their roadmaps with ours and prioritize rebuilding shared components on schedule.

To achieve the level of quality users expected, our team also rebuilt several critical webview components natively in Objective-C and Java. One example is the Action Bar, which is customizable and can include actions such as Edit, Log a Call, New Quote, etc. When users tap More, a native sheet animates upward to reveal additional actions. Both the Action Bar and its expanded sheet required custom animations and accessibility enhancements to meet Salesforce's standards for quality and usability.

Modernize navigation to help users complete tasks faster

The app's original navigation relied on a hamburger menu and multiple layers of taps to move between objects such as Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities. This structure slowed users down and made switching contexts unnecessarily complex. I partnered with Product Management and Engineering to introduce a tab bar, a familiar system-level navigation component on both iOS and Android. Because users were already accustomed to this pattern, the change immediately improved discoverability and efficiency.

Implementing the tab bar required a major engineering effort, expanding the app from a single webview stored in memory to five webviews that users could quickly switch between. The result was a dramatic reduction in friction and a smoother workflow. For example, users could now update an Opportunity while referencing information from a Lead without reopening menus. Navigation became faster, more intuitive, and better aligned with modern mobile platform conventions.

How to approach rethinking information architecture

When the task is to rethink an app's entire information architecture, my first step is to define the spectrum of what we can optimize for and how each option will impact the overall design. I visualize this as a sliding scale that helps balance business goals, customer needs, and platform constraints.

For the Salesforce Mobile App, the team explored two directions: optimizing for Salesforce-provided functionality such as search, notifications, and settings, or optimizing for customer data such as Accounts, Opportunities, and Dashboards. This work was done in close collaboration with a UX Architect and Salesforce's Chief Design Officer.

In the mockup below, tabs 2 through 5 are populated by Salesforce functionality rather than customer data. We experimented with making Salesforce features more prominent, but ultimately found that this approach conflicted with one of our core design tenets: staying out of the user's way.

In the alternate mockup, tabs 1 through 4 are populated by customer data. This approach prioritizes the customer's business objects and workflows, giving them faster access to the information they use most often.

Build native prototypes to test each IA direction

To validate both information architecture directions, I partnered with the engineering team to introduce TestFlight as a way to prototype, test, and gather structured feedback. Our goal was to build prototypes that felt real, using a combination of production code and static assets.

I influenced the engineering manager to allocate two engineers, one focused on iOS and one on Android, for a full month to build native prototypes. These prototypes were then used to demonstrate both approaches to the Product EVP and broader leadership.

I began the design exploration in Sketch, moved into Principle for motion studies, and then collaborated closely with engineers to translate those concepts into fully interactive native builds. Once ready, we distributed the prototypes through TestFlight and HockeyApp, enabling internal stakeholders and select customers to experience each IA direction firsthand.

Build a research lab

To ensure the redesigned information architecture was grounded in real user behavior, I worked with the design organization to secure a budget for an external researcher. Together, we created a dedicated research lab to test both native prototypes with users who were already familiar with the Salesforce Mobile App.

The sessions were designed to capture both qualitative and emotional feedback. We set up multiple cameras to record each user's phone screen and facial expressions simultaneously. This allowed the team to correlate moments of confusion or delight with specific interactions in the app. The insights gathered from these studies directly informed our final design decisions, ensuring the new architecture felt intuitive and efficient to real users.

Selecting a direction

After testing both prototypes with users, we learned that optimizing the information architecture for Salesforce functionality created several challenges:

• It catered more to Salesforce than to customers.
• It limited opportunities for customization.
• It prevented users from quickly navigating between objects.
• It made it harder to access custom applications and workflows.

In contrast, optimizing for customer data provided a far stronger foundation:

• It created a familiar experience by aligning mobile navigation with the desktop experience.
• It enabled customization, allowing users to rearrange items in the tab bar just like on desktop.
• It allowed faster navigation between objects.
• It made custom applications and workflows easier to reach.

The team moved forward with the customer data–centric information architecture. This decision not only improved usability but also led to measurable growth in monthly active users (MAU), daily active users (DAU), and overall engagement.

Create space for customer content to shine

As part of the team's unopinionated design tenet, we removed Salesforce's signature blue branding to let customer content take center stage. This approach allowed customers to tailor the app's interface to their own visual identity and avoid clashing with Salesforce's brand elements.

This shift represented more than a visual refresh. It reflected a mindset change. By collaborating closely with the Salesforce Design System team, we established a brandless interface that supported custom color systems, themes, and iconography. The result was a flexible, customer-first platform where the content, not the product, defined the experience.

Welcome new users with a video

For the launch, the team wanted to communicate that the new app was fast, modern, and full of new capabilities. I influenced the design organization to secure a budget for an external animator and took on the opportunity to act as a creative director for the project.

The animation introduced the redesigned app and set the tone for a fresh experience. It played before a series of small, contextual tooltips that appeared over successive launches to minimize interruptions while still helping users discover new features at their own pace.

Bring fun and joy to enterprise

The team looked for ways to make the interface not only efficient but also delightful to use. One challenge involved selecting actions on a record page. The existing design required users to scroll through a long vertical sheet, which was tedious and time consuming.

Our goal was to reduce the number of taps and eliminate the need to open the sheet altogether. The solution was "Joystick Mode," a new interaction that allowed users to select actions through a single tap-and-hold gesture. When activated, the action bar transformed into a carousel that users could swipe through and release to choose an action.

This playful yet practical interaction made the experience feel faster, more tactile, and more enjoyable, showing that enterprise software can still spark a sense of fun.

Designing for change management

Salesforce's multi-stakeholder approach to product development required the team to consider both end users of the mobile app and the administrators responsible for configuring and managing its rollout. The goal was to educate administrators so their organizations would be ready for the new app's interface and functionality.

Administrators needed tools to migrate custom pages and applications from the classic app to the redesigned version. They also required controls to deploy the app gradually to specific user groups for testing and feedback.

For example, Itaú Unibanco, Brazil's largest private sector bank, had more than 50,000 users at the time. Their admin team needed the ability to thoroughly test the new app with their extensive customizations before making it available company-wide. To support this, we designed the Mobile Quickstart page in Setup, which provided admins with everything they needed to manage the transition. It included a welcome video, documentation, and migration tools to ensure a smooth and confident rollout.

Extending customization to mobile

The team partnered with the Lightning App Builder team to design a set of web components that administrators could insert, rearrange, and configure directly from the desktop. Once a page was designed, it could be instantly deployed to the Salesforce Mobile App.

The goal was to empower administrators to build tailored interfaces that met specific business needs without additional engineering work. This created a seamless one-to-one relationship between the mobile app and the desktop builder tool, unifying customization across the entire Salesforce Platform.

Designing in partnership with Apple

During the redesign, I had the opportunity to meet weekly with Apple's Enterprise Design Team in Cupertino to ensure the Salesforce Mobile App incorporated the latest iOS capabilities. These sessions helped our teams align on performance, usability, and platform conventions.

One outcome of this collaboration was the successful launch of Siri Shortcuts throughout the app. Together, the Apple and Salesforce teams explored new ways for users to complete key tasks using voice commands, enhancing efficiency and accessibility for mobile professionals. The collaboration set a strong foundation for future innovation on iOS.

Empowering users to shape their experience

As the redesign reached maturity, the Mobile organization began using the Horizon Framework to guide long-term strategy and identify opportunities to deepen engagement. One Horizon 2 initiative focused on designing and building a new launch experience, known as Mobile Home. The goal was to give end users the ability to personalize their starting point in the app, helping them get work done faster.

For example, one user might prefer to open the app and see their events and tasks for the day. Another might want a list of active opportunities. A third might want to pin a key report. With Mobile Home, each user could tailor their landing page to surface the most relevant data, transforming Salesforce from a static experience into one that adapts to individual workflows.

Results and impact

The redesign of the Salesforce Mobile App drove measurable impact across both adoption and engagement:

• 1 million daily active users (DAU) and 2.5 million monthly active users (MAU)
• 100,000 customers and 2 million users successfully transitioned to the new app
• Zero red cases reported after launch
• App Store rating improved from 4.1 to 4.7 stars
• 30% increase in engagement
• Customers can now fully adapt the app to their unique business needs

These results reflected not only the success of the redesign, but also the strength of the underlying vision: to make Salesforce Mobile as powerful and flexible as the desktop experience.

Lessons in leadership and influence

Leading the redesign of the Salesforce Mobile App was one of the most complex and rewarding experiences of my career. It taught me how to influence at scale, navigate organizational complexity, and stay grounded in the user's perspective no matter how ambitious the challenge.

Key takeaways:

• A small, focused team can create outsized impact within a large organization.
• Using the "What's in it for me?" (WIIFM) approach helps align partners and stakeholders by connecting design decisions to their goals.
• Involving users throughout the journey ensures the team is solving real problems that matter.
• Finding the right person to help often matters more than trying to convince everyone.
• Not every feature needs to launch in version one. Iteration builds trust and momentum.

This project reaffirmed that leadership in design is about clarity, empathy, and persistence. When teams share a vision and rally around users, even the most complex products can be transformed into experiences that feel simple, human, and empowering.