Can we talk about the importance of ALWAYS (and I mean ALWAYS) keeping the User Experience in mind when we are designing, implementing, administering a system?

Remembering that in the majority of cases, the end users of the tool we are designing/implementing/administering are not experts in the tool. They shouldn’t have to be. There also should not be a large leap for an end user to learn how to use the tool. That’s where designing for the end user comes into play.

Take an Object Record Page in the Salesforce Lightning Experience as an example.

There are a bazillion ways to bling it out. There is also the ‘out of the box’ page. Neither should be something you leave with your customer.

Learn about your audience. Get to know their processes. How they will be using the data on the record page to make decisions. How decisions might be easier if this or that were displayed differently.

Then find an end user and let them loose on that record page while you watch. Ask them to tell you about it. See if they understand what they are looking at and can explain it back to you. Watch where they click and how they navigate. Do this with a few different levels of end user.

Dynamic Forms and conditional visibility of fields is becoming something I’m seeing a lot – they are amazing features but a little can go a long way. With great power comes great responsibility. Don’t overdo it.

And (personal opinion incoming) for the love of all that is good in this world, don’t use the Accordion Lightning Component in conjunction with Dynamic Forms! I beg of you!

There is nothing more confusing to a user to see some fields, but then to get to more fields they have to click on the accordion section label and the ones they were just looking at go away. WAIT, I didn’t want those to go away, I wanted to see more! Can they even tell there are more? Or do the sections blend into the page so they think what they see is what they get? Don’t confuse your users.

Remember: K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, silly)

Give them what they need when they need it.

Design for function and use. And design for the people that will be using it.

Also Compact > Comfy – fight me!