We all love a good looking Screen Flow, and lucky for us, the Flow Builder makes building these relatively easy. Summer ‘25 brings a new feature that will aid in this journey: Visual Picker.
If you’re looking for a way to spice up your Screen Flows or add a bit of visual differentiation with image-based choices, Visual Picker is for you. Let’s jump in and take a look at what Visual Picker brings to the table in Summer ‘25.
A BIG Visual Upgrade for Choices
Visual Picker is by no means the first or only tool that gives users the ability to make a selection in a Screen Flow, but it has a very ‘next generation’ feel to it compared to what has been available historically. In the past, if you wanted to allow users to make a selection from a list of choices, you were limited to just the checkbox groups, radio buttons, and picklists, with radio buttons and checkbox groups being the only way to empower users to select multiple options.
Visual Picker is a new way of gathering selections from users in a new and exciting way. Instead of radio buttons or checkboxes, users now get to see larger buttons with icons within them.
Visual Picker in Action
In case you haven’t had a chance to see Visual Picker in action, I thought I’d quickly go through an example Flow so that you can see how it’s done. In this example Screen Flow, I’ve rebuilt part of the Color Dungeon from 1993’s The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. If you remember playing through this dungeon – bonus points for you!
The above screenshot shows the entrance to the dungeon. We are presented with two skeletons – one blue, one red. In the original game, they served as a method of checking that the game was being played on the correct console (the Gameboy Color, as opposed to the Gameboy). In this Flow, they’re just cool. But you know what’s not so cool – that set of radio buttons at the bottom that you barely noticed!
In the dungeon, the player is asked to identify the color of the robe on the skeleton they’re talking to. You have to select either blue or red. In the example above, you can do this by marking either the Blue or Red radio button and moving forward… but that just doesn’t feel right. Enter: Visual Picker.
Now I’m sure this is exactly the use case Salesforce had in mind when they built the shiny new Visual Picker component… Just kidding! But it’s a fun way of visualizing the difference between this and other selection components like radio buttons and checkbox group. Let’s see what Visual Picker would look like instead.
Ah, that’s much better! You can see two large, interactive buttons with icons that stand out. This is the most important part of the screen, as is evident by the visual hierarchy that these buttons create. The icons also help to give the user a bit more visual guidance as they navigate the Screen Flow and make their selection.
Fun but only slightly related fact – at the end of the Color Dungeon, you get to select a special set of robes. Blue robes give you increased defence, while red robes give you increased attack strength. This is why I chose the power and shield icons!
I can hear you asking just how I added those icons to the choices – and the answer is quite simple. Inside your existing Choices (yes, Visual Picker supports all the Choice options available in existing Flows), you’ll now see a new option at the bottom to select an icon. In Summer ‘25, that selection is limited to standard SLDS icons only – no custom icons just yet.
Then, once you’ve selected an icon for your Choice, it’s ready to be added to a Visual Picker Component! Simply navigate to the screen that you wish to add a Visual Picker to and drag the Visual Picker in from the Components panel.
Configuring Visual Picker will feel very familiar to you if you’ve used radio buttons before – all the properties are identical, except for the addition of the Visual Picker Size option, which allows you to select either large, medium, or small buttons. Make sure you add the Choices that you’ve added your icons to as well!
Voilà! Visual Picker is now there to give a whole new lease on life to your existing Screen Flows, and is readily available for use in new Flows, too.
Adding Value to Your Business With Visual Picker
In terms of functionality, Visual Picker doesn’t offer anything that another component doesn’t already offer. The benefit with Visual Picker is purely aesthetic, and should be used carefully to ensure the benefits are not outweighed by the additional screen real estate that it takes up. Just because there’s a new and fancy toy doesn’t mean it should become the go-to anytime you need users to make a selection.
The great thing about Salesforce Flow (and Salesforce as a whole, really) is that there are many ways to attack a problem to make sure you’re doing it the best way possible – there are many tools in your toolbelt, and each has a specific use case.
If you’re looking to capture simple user feedback, the Visual Picker can be used to easily capture a simple positive or negative marker. This is a simple way of requesting feedback from the user without a cumbersome set of radio buttons. The options are clear – a tick or a cross: was the service good, or was it bad?
Another use case would be when you want to capture the type of user that someone is, or the team they belong to. The great thing about Visual Picker is that you can use the standard SLDS icons that are well-known in Salesforce.
In the example below, I’ve used the Opportunity icon to represent a sales user, the Case icon to represent support, and the Campaign icon to represent marketing. Users familiar with Salesforce will likely recognize these icons pretty quickly, especially if they’re filling in a form about themselves and they work with these objects on a daily basis.
One last use case that would benefit from the Visual Picker component is when you require your user to fill out a form in a Screen Flow and need them to provide different information based on the type of product or service they’re talking about, or based on the kind of information they’re about to submit. In this example, the user is required to submit evidence, and depending on what they’re about to submit, they will go through a different validation and consent process before submitting the file.
Something else to consider is that icons are more easily recognized in multi-lingual situations. When you’ve got a form that may be filled in by people who speak many different languages, there are universal symbols that will be recognized by everyone that you can use to break the language barrier.
Limitations and Potential for Future Enhancements
There are two glaring limitations with Visual Picker, and I’m sure you’ve picked up on them already just from reading this article: only standard Choice records are supported, and you can only use SLDS icons. I’d love to see Salesforce expand this in the future to allow custom icons, which might even enable support for other Choice Sets (such as Record or Collection), where the icon is specified in a field on the record.
Summary
Visual Picker is a breath of fresh air for users when they’re required to make a selection from a list of options. It’s a great way to allow users to quickly make a selection by visually recognizing the options rather than having to read them. It’s also a great way to break the language barrier and create an interface that everyone can use without needing to translate options.
Be careful not to overuse Visual Picker, however, as it does take up quite a bit more screen real estate than other options, which can introduce more harm than good.
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