Posted on October 11, 2021 in Admins 

16 Salesforce UI Features to Implement in Every Org

Customizing your Salesforce UI (user interface) can have a huge impact – plus, it’s quick, free, and easy enough that even the freshest of admins can do it!

User experience can truly make or break a system. 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 Salesforce certification to cement its importance.

In this guide, we’ll explore Salesforce UI features to implement in every Salesforce org, written in collaboration with Stacy O’Leary, 5x Certified Salesforce Administrator. Her motto? “Happy users = happy org”.

1. Salesforce App – Adapt Your UI

Users want to feel as if Salesforce is adapted specifically for them, so in the first of many adaptations, create a Salesforce app for each group of users.

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. UC – Human Resources or UC – Marketing.

2. 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, and colors.

Navigate to: Setup → User Interface → Themes & Branding.

Custom Hyperlink Color

You can also customize the color of any hyperlinks in your org.

3. MyDomain Logo, and Right Frame URL

The login page is the first place that a user interacts with Salesforce – and an opportunity for you, as the Admin, to customize the page.

You can choose to not customize the login page, and let your users login from login.salesforce.com:

Yes, fine, we’re all here ‘cause we love Salesforce. But this login page is boring.

Alternatively, users could login to a page, e.g. resourcefulfoxexample.salesforce.com:

The second login page is better because clearly it belongs to my company, unique and distinguishable from any other company’s Salesforce login page.

The max dimensions for the logo is 250px by 125px, and no larger than 100KB.

You may need to ask for a custom page to use as your right-frame URL, or even use your company’s webpage, if you can.

4. Page Layouts and Lightning Pages

Embrace the powerful Lightning App Builder to add, remove, or reorder components on a record page or homepage, creating intuitive and bespoke pages.

4. Compact vs. Comfy Navigation

Salesforce offers two display densities that can improve navigation:

• Comfy: A spacious view that takes up more space, 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… Once you go compact, you never go back!

6. 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!

7. Conditional Lightning Page Components

One of the main benefits of Lightning pages (versus traditional page layouts) is that we can significantly reduce the number of layouts required. Lightning pages support conditional components that can be configured to display (or not!) based on criteria that you define.

You could choose to filter component visibility based on:

• Field values
• Record type
• User profile or role
• Permission set
• Device (desktop or mobile)

The possibilities are seemingly endless and super powerful.

Let’s take a look at a simple example where conditional components can support multiple teams using a single Lightning page.

There are three teams working on Salesforce and 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.

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.

Here’s the old solution:

• Create three homepages and assign each one to the relevant profile.

And the new awesome solution:

• Create one Lightning homepage, include all the common components, and add a unique report component for each team.
• Next, with a report component selected, click on “Set Component Visibility”.
• Select “Advanced” > “Field – Select” > “User” > “Profile” > “Name”, and enter the value of the profile (make sure the Operator is set to “Equal”), then click “Done”.
• Repeat for all of the report components.
• Now the reports will only display for the relevant teams!

8. Rich Text Components

Use rich text components to share a message with your team or to include links to access information easily. You might use this on your homepage or on a record page, for example, to:

• Important announcements.
• Links to external folders.
• Link to reports.
• Picture celebrating the birthday of a user.
• Salesforce user of the month.

How To:

1. Go to the Lightning Page
2. Select the component – Rich Text
3. Drag onto the Page
4. Add your message
5. Press ‘Save’ and ‘Activate’ and voila!

9. 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 want! Organize list views according to the goals of that team’s work; this can be achieved using proper naming conventions and numbers to create a logical sequence.

10. Salesforce Path and Guidance

One of my absolute favorite user experience features! Salesforce Path allows the admin to guide users through the steps of a business process, such as working an opportunity from a fresh lead to a successfully closed deal. At each step of a path, you can highlight key fields and include customized guidance for success.

11. 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. It’s so simple to set up; when creating your Path, you choose at what point and how often to display confetti. For example, you might choose to rain confetti every time an Opportunity is ‘closed won’.

The first time I implemented this for a client, I immediately had a call asking if it was normal, because in her 15 years of experience working with CRMs she had never seen anything like it!

12. 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.

2. Icons and Image Formulas

A user-friendly way to display information is with the use of icons; such a simple thing but it can completely change the user experience. Here are some examples where icons can be used:

List View: Add 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 such as:

• Lead Quality
• Origin (Email, Phone, Fax)
• Profile Strength
• Segment (Hospital, Financial)
• Classification (One star, two stars)

14. 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. This leads to cleaner Salesforce record data.

Since we have to create an error message, we might as well make it entertaining!

15. 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 – but they won’t know why they’re unhappy with Salesforce.

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, VP’s, Sales Operations, 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 into each record.

However, if you customize the search columns, you can display relevant information to the end user, immediately.

All I did was modify a couple columns. I got rid of Account Site, because this org doesn’t use that field. I’ve removed “Owner Alias” and replaced it with “Owner Full Name”, I’ve added columns for “Type” and “Amount.”

Now it’s much easier to tell these apart from one another!

You’ll want to do this for every object in your org – especially the primary ones your team uses.

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.

16. 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 should create some general HTML email templates for future usage.

Bonus: Change your Sandbox Logo and Color Palette

My Admin confession: Early in my Salesforce career (as in, during week one) I was given a sandbox. I was tasked with using the data loader to mass close approx. 3,000 Cases in production. I had to figure out how to do that mostly on my own (you can probably guess where this story is heading).

I did all my record updates in the sandbox, when I was supposed to be working in production – I hadn’t even realized! I proudly told the whole team that the work was done, when it clearly was not. I’m not the only person who has done this.

Things are a little better today. We have the global header in Lightning sandboxes that displays ‘Sandbox: SandboxName’. However, I still think the “look” of a sandbox should be significantly different from production.
Fortunately, it’s easy to customize the look and feel of your sandboxes, and make them visually different from production. It’s also a fun way to add a sense of humor to your sandboxes, and the teams who work in them.

Navigate to: Setup → User Interface → Themes and Branding. Update the org’s color palette and logo.

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. These are 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!