UX STRAT Interview: Hervé Mischler, Salesforce

Paul: Thanks for taking time out to talk with me today. Please tell us a little bit about yourself, such as your job role, your company, how you got to this place in your career.  

Hervé: I’m an experience designer and strategist at Salesforce. I work for Saleforce’s strategic innovation team. My job is to help our most valued customers to envision their future.

I’ve been in this field for almost 20 years now. I started in the early days of the Internet, the late ‘90s. My background is in product design, but I started my career as a web designer and moved to UX at the end of 2007-2008, when I was working at Dailymotion. Dailymotion was the French competitor of Youtube. So, a similar product. It was a large-scale website where we had a lot of users, we were growing really fast, and I had to learn the job while being in the field and dealing with something like 60 million users at the time. So yeah, a great way to learn in my career.

When I left, I wanted to change and go to the Enterprise. That’s when I moved to SAP. The main reason for that was actually the relationship I had with users. Having previously worked on a video website, what I learned was designing products to get the user’s attention. If you do something wrong, the user just goes away. That’s how it is on the web, and that’s why you have to create good user experiences. But for the Enterprise, it’s totally different, because Enterprise users have to use your product whether they like it or not. If you’re designing something bad, not only are you making the use of the tool less effective, but you’re also giving those people a really bad day. It’s a bad experience and they need to have that bad experience over and over again just because someone decided to buy that software. So, I started focusing on the Enterprise at SAP, and now I’m doing something a little bit different at Salesforce.  

Paul: What does your role at Salesforce look like? What are your day-to-day activities?  

Hervé: My role is pretty specific. I’m very lucky because I’m meeting customers but I’m also really close to our product team. So, basically I’m making that connection with what customers really want. So, I talk a lot with customers; we’re doing design workshops, design sprints, and a lot of co-creation. Based on what we’re creating together, our team is in charge of thinking about new products and new solutions. So when it’s a solution, it is based on the Salesforce platform. But sometimes--and that’s our mission, actually--is to figure out what could be a future product for Salesforce.  

Paul: What do you plan on speaking about at UX STRAT Europe?  

Hervé: The topic I’m going to speak about is AI and privacy in the context of the future of work. So, I’m going to talk about the future of work because this is a topic I’ve worked on for some time, and it’s very linked to AI. It raises a lot of questions. So, I’m going to share what I discovered. It’s mostly about the impact of designing with AI and what you need to know when you’re designing with AI, especially because it raises a lot of questions about privacy, and this is a huge topic right now in Europe. So, designers need to be aware of that. They need to have the tools to work with these new technologies.  

Paul: Is it going to be more topical, or more of a case study, or how do you think you’re going to approach it?  

Hervé: There are different parts. There is a case study around what I learned in the context of the future of work. But I’m going to go a bit further than that. I’m going to dig a little bit more about what it means to design with AI as a tool, and also explore some new possibilities in terms of data privacy. So, we have a lot of new tools that come from the blockchain world. I don’t really like to use the word “blockchain”; I like “decentralized web.” Basically that’s a big vision for the future, where users own their data. And this is where we’re going, but we’re not ready yet. I think that with all the questions that are raised with the use of AI, it’s good to see that there is some future that people are thinking about with technologies that are created for humans and that they want to make a good experience.  

Paul: I think that’s a theme that we’re going to be hitting pretty hard at this conference. Since we first started talking together a few months ago, a lot has happened in the global press regarding privacy.  

Hervé: It’s moving really fast. It sort of reminds me of the beginning of web design, when we did those ugly websites with 3D logos and animated GIFs everywhere, and we had all these incredible tools and we had no clue what to do with them. We’re probably at the same place right now. The only difference is that what we are doing has a huge impact on people’s lives. That’s something really big and we need to be conscious of that. And that’s also something really new for a lot of designers, especially those coming from a more classic background where you design the website, you designapps… I don’t know when that happened, it was very recently, and it’s like we have these superpowers that we didn’t really ask for. They’re here and we have all these amazing tools, and we have no clue what to do with them.  

Paul: That makes sense. In Enterprise software, you are able to collect a lot of data about work habits and expertise, or the lack thereof, and people using the software may not be aware that this type of data can be captured and analyzed, possibly with uncomfortable results.  

Hervé: A lot of those things are controlled  by rules and regulations. So, it is not perfect, but it already has some very interesting constraints, especially in the world of the Enterprise. I think it’s quite mature, and what’s great, at least for us, is it’s a great opportunity to redesign things. It’s like all these things are changing… So, with my example of the future of work, my job was to transform HR organizations into talent-centered organizations, and that’s a big shift.  

But it also means that everything needs to be reinvented. And when you do that, you have to do it with integrating privacy by design as a very strong concept, and all those HR organizations, for them it’s really important, because employee data--you can’t just do what you want with it. So, it can be very complex. But on the other hand, this is a very good design challenge. You have to make the right decisions from the beginning. Because if you don’t make it right, there’s no way that kind of solution will be implemented or will be used by employees.  

Paul: So there are some new superpowers, but you’re able to design some controls, some data capture dials that users can turn up if there are other opportunities they might be interested in. Or maybe if they’re a little bit more paranoid, they can turn it down a little bit and provide less. So, interesting times in the Enterprise side of things.  

Hervé: Yeah, absolutely. Users want to feel in control. It’s  the same with AI. You don’t want everything automated. You don’t want things happening that you’re not aware of, because then you freak out. You have those moments where it becomes really creepy. And you don’t want that creepy experience, right? You want to be surprised, you want to have those magic moments, but you also want to know why it’s happening, and you want to be able to opt out if you’re not happy with it.  

Paul: It seems to me there’s a strong relationship between AI and augmented reality, which is going to be coming into the Enterprise pretty quickly. I think, over the next few years as many more people wear glasses that have additional information, AI is going to be overlaid on that, and provide both opportunities but also a lot of design challenges.  

Hervé: Yeah, so the thing is that AI is going to be everywhere, right? It’s going to be everywhere and we’re going to forget about it. So, that’s the interesting part, because it’s something that we’re going to design that is going to be part of our everyday life. And for augmented reality, you have some other challenges, because you’re adding a new dimension that is basically the vision, so you’ll have some tools that you’ll see with your own eyes and that will create that enhanced environment.  

But at the end of the day, what AI gives you--and I think this is the most important part of what we’re doing--is really empowering the users. And whatever we do when we’re designing with AI, the question you have to ask yourself is, “How am I empowering my user?” It can be in a lot of different ways, but if you’re not empowering your user, you shouldn’t be using AI. That’s the main thing. And it can be in a lot of different ways--I mean, it can be assistive, it can have that information that can help you make better decisions.  

There is also a part of automation, called agency technology, that’s going a bit further. You can automate all those low value activities from your day-to-day life and get more time to do what you’re really good at. That’s something that is going to change your life. Hopefully we’re going to make the future of work way more interesting and humans will get more value for what they’re really good at thanks to AI. I see something very positive and something that will help reveal your talents and your superpowers, rather than steal your job.  

Paul: As you look into the future, and as you talk to customers and think about the Salesforce trajectory, what changes do you see in the next three to five-year timeframe? How are people going to work differently in that timeframe?  

Hervé: I think a lot of things will change, especially the way organizations are working. I think we’re going to move from organizations that are role-based to organizations that are skill-based. So, you won’t have a title anymore; you will be recognized for your skills; you will have probably a reputation score that will be generated thanks to the feedback of your peers, but also some algorithms that will help with that. So, you will be recognized as an expert in some domain, and then those experts will be the ones who are going to make the decisions. And you will not be part of one group--work will be probably more project-based and you will use your skills on projects where you’re needed, where you’re really adding value.  

So, this is something that can change very quickly. I’ve seen a lot of customers that are interested in this vision. Of course, it’s something that needs a lot of work to implement and that needs to be done very cautiously because you have a lot of factors that could make this go wrong. Everything you do, you need to be sure that everyone is treated equally, that there’s no bias in the data. You need, of course, to get some feedback and also to have humans having an important part in the process and not to automate too many things.  

So, I think it will go slowly, but I think it’s very interesting because people will work more and more on projects they’re interested in, as well. So, what you will do will also match your interest.  

Paul: Well, I’m very excited about your talk. Any last words before we wrap up this interview?  

Hervé: Just that I’m really excited to be speaking at UX STRAT Europe. So, come and be there and have a lot of discussions with the attendees. Actually, I’m expecting questions and some interesting discussions.

Paul: I’m looking forward to it as well!