Behind the Build: Reimagining a Community Platform from the Ground Up

How we created a community-driven hub that empowered users to connect, contribute, and co-create with a playful UX and a scalable foundation, as a team.

What do you get when you combine a passion for self-served demo customization, a growing network of Solution Engineers, and an aging platform struggling to keep up? An opportunity. One I embraced as the UX architect, leading a team of junior designers and engineers to reinvent the experience from the ground up—for both creators and consumers of demo components.

🤔 Challenge to Solve

How might we offer a user experience that encourages participation, facilitates discovery, and makes contributors feel proud of their involvement?

We knew the challenge wasn’t just about features. It was about cultivating a sense of belonging, helping users feel empowered to share their work, discover relevant content, and connect with others in meaningful ways.

🥾️ Path to Solution

Listening First

We started with interviews and community surveys. Creators felt friction at every step: publishing was clunky, profiles were impersonal, and the system didn’t reflect their efforts or foster discovery.

Designing with Roles in Mind

We designed for three core personas:

Contributors who wanted a smooth way to share and track their work.
Visitors who came to learn, explore, and maybe become contributors themselves.
Community Managers who needed oversight, analytics, and moderation tools.

New demo components homepage — Solution Engineers land on a sleek, centralized hub where all demo components and resources are organized for quick, effortless access, setting the stage for smooth demo preparation.

Enhancing Content Accessibility with a Robust API Layer

To enhance scalability and maintainability, we transitioned to a microservices architecture. This allowed individual components to be developed, deployed, and updated independently, fostering innovation and reducing interdependencies.

Demo components are described in great details.

Demo component detail view and search results on desktop — Users can dive deep into individual demo components or quickly find what they need using an intuitive search—making exploration and preparation a breeze.

demo components creator's page on mobile

Demo component detail view and search results on mobile — Optimized for on-the-go users, these screens let you explore component details and perform quick searches anytime, anywhere.

Elevating the Community Feel

We focused on micro-interactions and content discovery:

Celebrated contributor profiles.
Surfaced most loved and most helpful content.
Added commenting, reactions, and content suggestions.

The creation of new demo components is a celebration

Celebrating contribution with micro-interactions — Small but powerful animations and feedback moments that make contributing feel rewarding and engaging, turning everyday actions into delightful experiences.

🚀 Outcomes That Speak Volumes

This was our first full end-to-end design project at Salesforce, led by a young, dynamic team hungry for impact. The results? Clear and compelling:

Doubled contributor engagement within just two months, fueling the growth of a vibrant platform with over 8,800 active users, each one empowered to share, explore, and build more effectively.
Reduced content publishing time by 40%, streamlining workflows and automating moderation to get high-quality components out the door faster.
Increased content discoverability by 60%, thanks to improved search engine and a cleaner content structure which helped drive over 41,000 component installs just a couple years in.
Reduced content management overhead significantly, empowering the newly formed support team with moderation tools and automation keeping 960+ components actively maintained without burning out the folks behind the scenes.

📚 Key Learnings

Designing mobile-first promotes clarity and simplicity. It highlights essential information and naturally leads to structures that are easier for users to navigate, resulting in cleaner, more effective designs.
It takes a village to build, launch, support, and evolve a product. Orchestration hinges on strategic alignment getting the right people moving in the right direction at the right time.
Keeping the end user front and center isn’t just a design principle, it’s a critical driver of success. When teams align around user outcomes, decision-making sharpens, priorities become clearer, and products deliver real impact.

🧩 Final Thoughts

Building this platform wasn’t just a technical upgrade. It was about turning a quiet content site into a buzzing digital town square. It worked because we put the community first and gave them the tools to thrive.