How to Help Your Users Adapt to the Salesforce Lightning User Interface

Salesforce Lightning is a different and separate platform from its earlier iterations. While it does make development for mobile and custom applications far more user-friendly, there are considerations to keep in mind as you transition.

To many admins and users, Salesforce Lightning will seem like a completely new platform. While getting used to new Lightning features may take some time, the main learning curve will be getting used to the new Lightning interface. As users get used to the new interface, mistakes are likely to occur. Assess your Salesforce user-inflicted data loss risk and ensure you lock down admin and user access so they will be less likely to accidentally delete or corrupt data.

The page layouts are drastically different in Salesforce Lightning vs. Salesforce Classic. Pay close attention to this throughout the Lightning transition by investigating each admin and user view. One major difference in the page layout is the buttons. These could easily confuse a user if there are new or differently-placed buttons in their view. For admins, it may be easier to accidentally mass delete data, such as full list views.

In Lightning, users can create new records through the “Quick Create” view on the lookup window. Sometimes this could lead to the creation of duplicate records if a user isn’t sure that the record already existed. To remove this from specific user interfaces, uncheck “Create” in the user’s profile. Train your users on how to look up existing records and the appropriate process for creating new records.

The new UI contains a Lightning Component that tells you immediately on the page if there are any potential duplicates. For example, "2 duplicates detected" appears much more prominently to Salesforce Lightning users than in Classic.

Before transitioning to Lightning, note where your Javascript buttons are located across your Salesforce platform. These are no longer supported, because of security challenges, so Lightning components will block any standard javascript from being used. Before transitioning to Lightning, you’ll need to refactor them as Quick Actions, Lightning Actions, or Visualforce actions to prevent users from encountering any issues or bugs.

In Lightning Experience, cases are feed-first and display a Chatter tab first, rather than record details or related information. While this is meant to help support agents collaborate and work with cases faster, it may confuse users if they are not trained before being transitioned to Lightning. To fully benefit from the feed-first design on cases, recreate your Salesforce Classic case feed publisher actions in Lightning Experience. One benefit of recreating the publishers actions is that they appear on mobile devices, whereas the Salesforce Classic case feed publishers don’t.

A highlight of Lightning Experience is the Kanban feature that allows sales users to visually review the status of their records. The user can drag and drop records from one column to another and get alerts when an action is needed on a key deal. Be careful when training your sales team on this new UI. If they’re not being careful or are working too quickly, they could accidentally drag and drop a record to the wrong column.

After transitioning to Lighting, the top-down tab-key order, page up/page down, home, end, and arrow up/down keyboard shortcuts will not be supported. If your users have gotten used to using keyboard shortcuts in Salesforce classic, you may want to update their page layouts to support this in Lightning. If changing the page layouts will be too time consuming, you’ll need to train users on how to properly enter data on these pages in Lightning.

Users and executives who actively leverage dashboards and forms will experience a significant interface change post-transition to Lightning. Buttons may not be in the same places as before. Users will no longer be able to drag and drop fields. Train your users and executives on how to navigate this new UI before making the switch to Lightning.

Another shortcut action your users may have gotten used to in Salesforce Classic is double clicking when choosing values for a multi-select picklist. In Lightning Experience, users have to use the arrow buttons on the UI to move items across. Remind your users that double click is no longer available to help avoid frustration during their first time using the new interface.

In Lightning Experience, the related lists “Partners” and “Competitors” are no longer available under opportunities and accounts. This could be a showstopper for certain organizations that have numerous partners involved in each opportunity. Luckily, the Salesforce AppExchange application “Partners Related List for Lightning Experience” provides a workaround. If this functionality is critical to your org, make sure you install this application.

Download our eBook for more tips on how to successfully transition to Lightning.