Customizing your Salesforce User Interface (UI) can have a huge impact – it’s quick, most of the time free, and easy enough that even the freshest of admins can do it! User experience can truly make or break a system. Plus, there’s an incredibly high ROI on these Salesforce UI customizations. Improve the design and navigation for the user, and you’ll see better user adoption. Creating an intuitive, consistent interface that reflects positively on your brand or platform can actually improve their mood and willingness to use Salesforce.
User experience design for Salesforce is becoming an increasingly hot topic, with the dedicated Salesforce UX Designer certification to cement its importance in this space as well. In this guide, we’ll explore some of the Salesforce UI features you can explore implementing in every Salesforce org.
1. Customize the Login Page
The login page is the first place a user interacts with Salesforce– as the admin, this is a great opportunity to customize the page. You can always choose not to make any chance to the login page and let your users log in here as usual.
We’re all here because we love Salesforce, but this login page without any tweaks is Salesforce’s default, and is not tailored for your organization.
A better alternative is having your users log in to a page like this example below with MyCompany – giving you more control over the experience before the user logs in.
As you can see, the second login page is more tailored to MyCompany and unique and distinguishable from the generic Salesforce login page. The image should be either JPG, JPEG, GIF (yes, GIF!), or PNG (it cannot exceed 100 KB). In addition to the URL and logo in the right frame, you can also change the background color.
Remember that you don’t have to use all of them, as in the end, you could simply add the business’s logo and call it a day – simple, yet effective!
2. Salesforce Apps
Users should feel as though the Salesforce experience is adapted specifically for them. So in the first of many adaptations, it is a good idea to create a dedicated Salesforce app for each group of users or personas within your organization. This will allow you to show a specific set of relevant tabs, as well as name the app after the group of users e.g. Human Resources or Marketing.
This is easily achievable by navigating to App Builder in Setup, and spinning up a new App in just a few seconds if you already have it planned out. Remember that this app will probably be just the first of many iterations as your org grows, so it’s all about getting started first, then tweaking it more and more as needs of different personas change.
In addition to the app itself, you can also cater for your users using Lightning Pages, such as the homepage, which can be assigned to individual apps. Instead of leveraging the per-app assignment, you can go one step further!
For example, if three teams are working on Salesforce, they all need the same basic information on the homepage (Tasks, Events, Recent Items, and Chatter). However, each team has a specific requirement in terms of the metrics they would like to see in a report. For example:
- Marketing Team: “I would like to see a report of my campaigns, but I don’t want to see any finance or sales information”.
- Sales Team: “I would like to see a report of my leads by status, but I don’t want to see any marketing or finance information”.
- Finance Team: “I want to see a pipeline report of all open opportunities, but I don’t want to see any marketing or lead information”.
An unfavorable solution is to create three different pages and assign each one to the specific profile and app, which would be difficult to maintain. Instead of multiple homepages, a more effective approach is to utilize a single, well-designed homepage. This can be achieved by creatively employing components and filters, such as those based on Profile. Feel free to explore and implement other available filter options as necessary:
- Create one Lightning homepage, include all the common components, and add a unique Report Chart component for each team.
- Next, add a Filter in the “Set Component Visibility” section on the component.
- Select “User” > “Profile” > “Name”, and enter the value of the Profile, check that the operator is the one you want (we’ve all been in a situation where we chose the wrong one instead, so best to be sure), then click “Done”.
- Repeat for all of the report components that vary by team, and that’s it!
3. Double Down on Lightning Pages
Continue to embrace the powerful Lightning App Builder to further add, remove, or reorder components on record pages and create intuitive and bespoke pages! With Dynamic Forms being an absolute game changer to the entire experience, it’s vital to make the most of this functionality where available.
Long story short, you can add sections where you can tweak the visibility of every single field based on criteria, such as the value in another field and more.
This functionality is not something available within page layouts at all (unless the field is either not added to the assigned layout or the user doesn’t have permissions to it). So if you needed one more reason to migrate to Lightning, this one is certainly worth noting.
As you saw in the example above with the homepage, components can be filtered on Lightning Pages, but Dynamic Forms (and Dynamic Actions for that matter) bring these possibilities to a whole new level.
Another key aspect of Lightning Pages (which is a newer addition as Salesforce continues to invest in the overall functionality) is the option to filter individual Tabs if you opt to use the Tabs component.
This means you can forget having multiple Record Pages just to avoid cluttering the page with all tabs for the various teams, while displaying to your users exactly the ones they need to see to get their job done.
4. Navigation Bar Tabs
As a Lightning Apps administrator, remember that users can personalize their navigation bar tabs. This includes rearranging tabs, adding object tabs, and even incorporating Reports or Dashboards for faster access. If you allow this customization, ensure you inform your users of this capability.
When creating the App, you will be presented with the page for App Options: make sure not to check the box if you want your users to be able to edit the tabs, as this will disable the option.
When the option is available for a given app, users will see the familiar pen icon on the right-hand side of the bar. Clicking this will enable them to start customizing their experience in no time!
5. Utility Bar
Before we move on to other possible UI enhancements, another important Lightning App item is the Utility Bar. For every new application development, I consistently consider the utility bar’s implementation. Its ease of access and immediate productivity benefits, as utility items are accessible from any page within the application, make it a crucial feature for users.
However, this is not a decision you have to make only when creating the app, since you can always come back and add Utility Items if needed.
There are multiple standard components you can choose from the get-go, including Salesforce Flows. As a quick example, let’s take a look at record creation. Although creating a Contact can be done with a Global Action, if you want to go one step further and have a more detailed experience – with instructions and tips, let’s say – using a Screen Flow as an Utility Item can do wonders!
6. Global Actions
Global Actions, accessible from any Salesforce page, are a frequently overlooked productivity tool. Despite their simplicity, these actions can offer a swift and positive impact on user experience – even basic features can significantly enhance productivity.
For example, when using a Global Action to create a Lead, the screen will simply pop up on the right-hand side, allowing the user to immediately start entering information.
Additionally, as the Salesforce Admin, you have full control over the layout (which luckily is completely independent from the Object’s Page Layouts and Record Pages), predefined values, and even which actions every Profile will have access to.
7. Themes and Branding
Themes and branding enable you to customize the look and feel of Salesforce to match the branding of your organization. You can add logos, default images, colors, and even decide if you’d like hyperlinks to have your brand’s color!
Navigate to: Setup → User Interface → Themes and Branding. Once the theme is saved, you don’t have to use it immediately. It can easily be previewed so that you can see it in different contexts and pages, tweaking it as necessary, before making it available to your users.
Even if your org will be using a custom theme, the individual Lightning Apps can still be set to choose their individual image and color rather than the theme.
Salesforce’s Winter ‘25 release introduced the new Cosmos theme, a product of their ongoing efforts to improve the Lightning experience. This theme focuses on enhanced accessibility and user-friendliness through rounded, more intuitive icons, increased customization options, and improved typography. Users can adopt the Cosmos theme directly or leverage its foundation to develop a completely custom theme.
This new theme is powered by SLDS 2 (which is currently in beta) and represents the new generation of the Salesforce Lightning Design System framework, which empowers admins, designers and developers to better represent the company’s brand in their solutions, all while maintaining a consistent experience with the Salesforce Lightning look and feel.
8. Compact vs. Comfy
Salesforce offers two display densities that can improve navigation, which users can switch between at any point:
- Comfy: A view that takes up more space on screen, with labels on the top of fields and increased space between page elements.
- Compact: A denser view with labels to the left of the fields and less space between page elements. The compact view can drastically reduce the need to scroll for information. So, once you go compact, you never go back!
9. Compact Layouts
A compact layout displays a record’s key fields at a glance in both the Salesforce mobile app and Lightning Experience. They also work when you hover over a master-detail or lookup field in Salesforce Lightning. Give more with less!
Note that only one compact layout per object can be assigned at a time for all users if you are not using Record Types for that object. So while it could be a quick win, make sure to assess any potential user experience impact before rolling out changes.
Also, you can improve user experience by customizing related list columns, similar to how compact layouts display key fields. For example, on an Account record, displaying the “Forecast Category” before the “Stage” in the Opportunities related list can provide more immediate insight for users. Consider tailoring these columns to enhance information accessibility.
10. Dynamic Highlights Panel
I couldn’t write about Compact Layouts without also bringing up one of the newest available features for Record Pages: the great Dynamic Highlights Panel.
As I mentioned above, one of the possible headaches when using Compact Layouts is that you can’t assign them to specific Profiles directly, but another limitation is that the fields added cannot be conditionally displayed – this is exactly where this new feature comes into play.
While the “old” Highlights panel will simply display what is on the associated compact layout, the dynamic one allows you to pick and choose directly on the Record Page exactly what you want to add and who should see it. If only the Marketing team needs to see the Account Site, let’s say, you can easily do that with a filter!
11. Rich Text Components
Use rich text components to share a message with your team or include links to access information easily. You might use this on your homepage or a Record Page for:
- Important announcements
- Links to external folders
- Link to reports
- Picture celebrating the birthday of a user
- Salesforce user of the month
You simply need to edit the Lightning Page of your choice, drag the Rich Text component, then add your message and/or links, and voilà!
12. List Views
There is nothing more annoying than opening Salesforce and having a ton of list views to scroll through to find the one you or your users want! Organizing list views according to the goals of the team’s work is important. This can be achieved using proper naming conventions and numbers to create a logical sequence.
To make searching list views more efficient, ensure they have clear and intuitive names so users can quickly find the one they need instead of endlessly scrolling.
Additionally, keep track of users with the Manage Public List Views permission. This authority should not be assigned to everyone in the org, as it allows editing all publicly available list views.
If someone added an extra filter on a list view available to everyone else, this might just be the reason.
13. Help Menu
Another often overlooked feature is the Help Menu at the top right corner of the page. Out of the box, it does include links and sections decided by Salesforce, but did you know you could add your own section?
Within Setup, navigate to the Help Menu page. Unlike other features, you will first have to name your section and add at least one resource before being able to turn the feature on. The good news is that once you add a name for the resource and a URL, your custom section will appear first, where users can click on the question mark.
14. Salesforce Path and Guidance
One of my absolute favorite user experience features! Salesforce is more than a database full of fields to collect endless data. Salesforce is designed to streamline processes, automate, and improve ways of working.
Path allows admins to guide users through each step of a business process, such as working an opportunity from a fresh lead to a successfully closed deal. During every step, you can highlight key fields and include customized guidance for success.
Additionally, users can directly edit the available key fields within Path, removing the need to navigate further down on the layout. Users also have the option to either collapse or expand this section if they wish to (if it doesn’t appear on their page, that might as well be the reason).
15. Salesforce Celebration
Celebration is a key feature that demonstrates the importance of user experience and how much importance Salesforce places on creating an engaging interface. Salesforce Celebration empowers admins to interact with users in a fun, visual way to celebrate wins – and it’s so simple to set up!
When creating your Path, you can choose when and how often to display confetti. For example, you might choose to rain confetti every time an Opportunity Stage is “Closed Won”.
17. Keyboard Shortcuts
If you have teams working with multiple cases at the same time, then this feature is perfect for you. Salesforce supports multiple keyboard shortcuts to improve productivity and help users work more efficiently.
For sales teams specifically, remember to let them know that when it comes to currency fields, they don’t have to write all the zeros manually. For these situations when they need to input an amount (perhaps a placeholder for Total Amount before adding Products even), they can append K, M, or B to the base number to get the amount they want.
18. Icons and Image Formulas
A user-friendly way to display information is with icons. It’s such a simple thing, but it can completely change the user experience. Here are some examples of where icons can be used:
- List View: Add an icon while you write the list view name.
- List View Records: Add your formula fields to the list views (check out the Channel column!).
- Record: Have formula fields with images on your record page to represent information.
- Report: If your users are more familiar with using reports rather than list views or checking out individual records, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t benefit from the formula, even as a grouping!
- Record page: The newest option when it comes to icons related to your fields is conditional formatting. If you’re using Dynamic Forms or the Dynamic Highlights Panel, you can configure this feature for each specific field directly on Record Pages. You will have to create a ruleset with criteria, choose the icons and their colors (note that there are just a few logos and colors available as of now), and then watch it in action on an individual record!
19. Validation Rule Message
Validation rules are an extremely effective way of ensuring that the information entered is in the right format before the user can save the record, leading to cleaner Salesforce record data.
Since we have to create an error message, we might as well make it entertaining!
Additionally, for even more complex messaging and an easier way to achieve complex validation rules without Apex – as of Winter ’24 – the new Custom Error Flow component will definitely become your go-to for these scenarios. By using this new addition, the error message is no longer only plain text and can also reference field values or resources from within the Flow.
20. Search Layouts and Search Filters
Search results and filters. If you do it right, no one will know you’ve done anything at all – they’re just one of those things! Ignore them completely, and your users will be unhappy with Salesforce (and not really know why).
Search Layouts
We’re all familiar with the global search at the top of the page, but if you haven’t customized the search results for each object, then you might be letting your users down. Take Opportunities – sales reps, VPs, sales operations, and even customer support probably search for an Opportunity multiple times a day.
Here, I’ve searched for the term “United Oil” and have ended up with some search results that are almost impossible to tell apart from each other. You know this will frustrate your users, who will probably click on each record.
However, if you customize the search columns, you can display relevant information to the end user immediately. Now it’s much easier to tell these apart from one another! Even more so, you can customize the search layout per Profile if you’d rather not use the default one for everyone.
Search Filters
Search filters add another layer to the users’ search capabilities. The filters on the left allow me to narrow down my search based on the criteria you select.
21. Einstein Search
Available directly within the global search at the top of the Salesforce screen, Einstein Search generates results immediately as you click on it or start typing. It offers the possibility to use natural language for broader searches – for example, “My Accounts” or “My Leads” have never been easier to find.
As of Winter ’22, Einstein Search is also turned on by default; hence, it’s only a matter of getting the information out there and tweaking the settings as needed.
22. Letterheads and Email Templates
Letterheads (for classic email templates) can be found by navigating to: Setup → Letterheads. First, add your logo to a documents folder, and make it external-facing. Once you’ve uploaded the logo, you can start creating the HTML email templates for future usage.
For external emails, where either a Lead or a Contact is the recipient, you can also make use of Lightning Email Templates, created with the Email Template Builder. The email can either look very similar or very different from the Classic ones, depending on which of the functionality you decide to use – for example, you could have multiple columns, or enhance the template with HTML.
23. Screen Flows
The possibility of having guided wizards for various processes across the organization is sure to sound appealing to both admins and users. Screen Flows allow control every step of the way – varying from simple filters for when and if a field should show up to background automations, default values, and more recently, on-screen formula reactivity.
Screen Flows can easily be added on Lightning pages for users to make use of such step-by-step screens either on their homepage or, why not, on standard and custom object records directly.
24. Elevate Your Dashboards with Image and Rich Text Widgets
Salesforce dashboards now offer enhanced out-of-the-box analytics. Available in all editions from Spring ’24, users can incorporate text and image components as widgets alongside standard report charts, significantly expanding their analytical capabilities. This change also resulted in the number of components being increased to 25 in total!
Take a look at how the new widget options look in the dashboard below, and be sure to check out this dedicated article to learn more about the available options and key considerations.
25. Inline Editing
While it may not be something to actually implement as much as it is a user enablement task, the ability to edit records directly in list views and reports, as well as the new Sales Cloud Everywhere extension Workspace option, will increase productivity and lower the number of clicks for both new and experienced users.
Important considerations for each option include whether the edited fields are present on the page layout and whether they are long text areas. Users have the option to pick and choose which one to use as long as they know these options exist.
26. Generative AI in the Flow of Work
And finally, in this day and age, the list couldn’t be complete without mentioning Agentforce, Prompt Builder, and ultimately the increase in efficiency that using Gen AI directly within Salesforce can bring for both end users across the Salesforce ecosystem.
With Salesforce Foundations providing a limited number of free Einstein Requests and conversations, this will allow you to experiment with specific use cases or a small group of users. By showcasing these capabilities in action, you can effectively demonstrate the potential benefits to stakeholders.
Something as straightforward as summarizing a record with just one click and in just a few seconds can ultimately save a significant amount of time. Also, all while your data remains yours, thanks to the Einstein Trust Layer, which ensures personal information is masked before sending the request to the LLM.
Summary
User experience features should help you meet the needs of your users and can truly make or break a system. Creating an intuitive, consistent interface that reflects positively on your brand or platform can actually improve their mood and willingness to use Salesforce.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just our personal favorites. I hope that you’re able to implement some of these in your own org.
Do you have a favorite UI customization that’s not listed here? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments: