LaunchDM has been part of Dreamforce for the past seven years. With it being my second Dreamforce, I thought I knew what to expect. Last year was our second year hosting design consultations and it was a big year for LaunchDM – we were part of a large User Experience and User Interface area hosting the consultations with double the staff as the year prior. It was a busy week and we met a lot of great people in 2014.
Little did I know, Dreamforce ’15 was going to be even bigger and better! Salesforce made the major announcement of the Lightning Experience this year for Dreamforce. Along with the Lightning Experience, a completely redesigned Salesforce experience, what used to be the UX/UI area was now Design HQ, a huge area right at the top of the escalators in Moscone West. This was a prime foot traffic area and Design HQ was front and center. We took even more staff out this year to host design consultations, promote LaunchDM’s services and present our Mobile Sales Presentation app, SalesBuddy Pro to the entire Salesforce ecosystem. It occurred to me early on that this year was going to somehow blow even last year out of the water and I still didn’t know what to expect!
It was an incredibly busy week. Between traveling back and forth between Salesforce’s Dreamboat (which our whole team stayed on), meeting with the Salesforce ecosystem and giving them one-on-one UI/UX coaching, and the good times to be had after the conference each night, it made for one very busy trip. With busy comes productivity though, and we definitely had a productive week. We met with over 200 people for design consultations with questions ranging from general info on the new Salesforce Lightning experience to questions about how to make an app or visualforce page more user-friendly and look better than the standard classic Salesforce UI.
As a team, we had a ton to offer this year at Dreamforce. We met with people from some of the largest companies and partners to offer our expertise in design and the new Lightning experience. We also got to demo our mobile sales presentation app to the Dreamforce attendees. We received amazing feedback for both SalesBuddy Pro and our consultations while making a lot of connections in the ecosystem. Our area consisted of four iMacs on a long table with plenty of stools to have multiple consultations at once, and two partner booths to showcase our services and SalesBuddy Pro. This was our first year getting a partner booth to share our services to all of Dreamforce, so that was definitely a cool experience. We had the opportunity to be more integrated with the Salesforce world during Dreamforce than ever before.
Nights were capped off with good food and live entertainment. On Wednesday, the LaunchDM team attended a Salesforce Creative party with awesome hors d’oeuvres (I’m still dreaming about those mini grilled cheese sandwiches and beef carpaccio) and a special performance by California’s own Capital Cities. The next night was Dreamfest at Pier 70 featuring Gary Clark Jr., The Killers, and The Foo Fighters, who all absolutely killed it! It was an amazing show. Friday night was topped off with an incredible dinner at Michael Mina’s Bourbon Steak restaurant before flying home. It was the perfect way to end an exceptional week!
Now, back to business as usual…
