Salesforce Summer ’20 Highlights for Designers
Happier users are coming…
This post is not detailing all the features in Summer, but rather 2 key areas that will make a big difference for users.
A great user experience is about what you can take away, not add
Summer ’20 is another step to giving designers finer control of the unique experience different parts of a business expect.
Every enterprise platform has a tension between business and IT goals. Each business unit expects something tailored for their area to get maximum benefit, IT wants something that is scalable and easy to maintain for the entire enterprise.
With each release we’re getting closer to something that mostly satisfies both. The most tangible way this is reflected is in the user interface. Users rightly expect a simple interface, asking only what they need to provide for the task at hand, just as they experience on webforms and modern mobile apps. Traditionally this has been tough to do whilst keeping IT and business both happy. Users see layouts with fields and actions that aren’t relevant to them, and notified of criteria to complete the task on saving the record through validation rules. IT can solve this but at a huge administrative cost of multiple page layouts, record types and profiles, sacrificing agility in the process.
Dynamic Forms & Actions
Although we’ve been in lightning for a while, you can still see the legacy page layout architecture at play. With Summer ’20 we see the first step towards abandoning the legacy page layout framework and replacing with ‘Dynamic Forms’. This is the first configurable user interface capability to display fields that doesn’t use the page layout. This allows fields to be displayed based on criteria, eg. if a record has a certain status, only show certain fields. You can also place fields in components and place them around the page.
The same applies to actions. Salesforce actions (the buttons at the top of a page) can now be configured with criteria to display actions only if they’re relevant.
The net result of this is far less for users to see or interact with daily. Once you overlay Flow on top of this we will start seeing users finding the platform far easier to use and less training.
Place fields in different components, and set the criteria for displaying the field.
Specify criteria for displaying actions
Note that Dynamic Forms & Actions are early in their release lifecycle and as such are only available on custom objects and not GA in this release.
Read more:
Embedded training — In App Guidance
In-App guidance is criminally underrated. This is a feature that allows fine tuned embedded training in Salesforce, and is easy to author. Summer sees this expanding to multi step walk-throughs of new capability. However, the multi step walk-through capability is only available with a myTrailhead licence. My prediction is that myTrailhead will eventually encompass a stack of things to help onboarding (eg. multi step walk-through), not just the myTrailhead platform itself.
In-App guidance is something every Salesforce environment should adopt, regardless of having access to multi step walk-through.
Read more:
Wrap up — the future experience
I’m excited when I think 6 months from now the typical Salesforce user experience should be logging in, seeing some new features announced on the interface, then performing those tasks using a wizard/flow interface and only seeing what you need on each page, with actions and fields dynamically showing based on activity.
