The reality is not all companies are ready to jump straight into Lightning. Depending on the company and time of year even keeping Salesforce up and running can be daunting. This doesn’t mean you can’t still be preparing for Lightning. I’ve talked about it previously, but it bears repeating, Lightning is amazing for all the opportunities it provides your company. Salesforce was never one size fits all, but Lightning takes that to a whole new level. So while your company is tackling the big stuff, check out the following smaller changes that can still have a huge impact.

Prepopulating Forms

Salesforce is all about wanting the best data so it makes sense to try and get as much information as you can, however, this can come at the expense of user experience. Asking me to fill out the same field with the same thing a hundred times is a really fast way to get on someone’s naughty list.

In classic we have the options of a predefined value for the field itself or a URL that populates the value that you can use without making any drastic changes.

As soon as Lightning is available check out Quick Actions, they are fast to make and really flexible.

Page Flow

One of the most common trends I at least have run into is the endless scroll. As each field is added to the page it gets longer and longer. At the beginning its easy to organize your pages into reasonable sections but as time goes on, we add and add to a page until the original page is no longer recognizable and users are using CNTRL F to find the fields they need to fill out.

Tackling the endless list of fields can take time and there is nothing stopping tackling a few fields at a time to determine:

  1. What is the field for?
  2. Who is supposed to use the field?
  3. Should the field be on the page?
  4. Are there any validations on the field? If so, are they up to date?

You won’t need Lightning to start removing fields from pages and trimming ahead of time has a few crucial benefits. First off users have time to recognize fields that were identified as not needed, but really are needed. Giving this extra time means users aren’t trying to adapt to a lot of new stuff only to realize they are getting stuck without what they need at the same time.

Secondly, new field pairings may emerge during this causing you to reevaluate how your page flows. This information can be very useful during your migration, at the very least keeping the fields grouped similar can help your users recognize what they are looking for.

Finally, tackling this as smaller enhancements mean you can spread the work more evenly and make the changes over time and plan which users will be impacted when and give you more time to garner the feedback from your users.

Once Lightning is enabled the flow you created for your page can be even more fully unlocked with the flexibility of Lighting Pages. Allowing information to be moved to highlight panels, sidebars, multiple components, tabs, and more means users can skip the scroll, but still have an idea of the flow.

Record Flow

Whether you are using sales path, service path, or just different statuses and record types users frequently internalize the correct path and don’t push back on extra clicks or steps if they allow the user to still perform their jobs without too much of a hassle. Asking users how they flow through their work can give you a good idea of how the users are navigating around and what they need.

In classic we can do things like reorder tabs or even create a custom app for a purpose or team. For some concerns creating a flow, workflow rule, process builder or even approval process may already increase their efficiency.

Once you are looking at moving to Lightning, Paths and Quick Actions once again can increase your users work speed. Knowing your flow ahead of time can even help you set up a Lightning App with a Home page that displays pieces of information from the process that help users skip steps.

Most of the items listed break apart pretty easily into smaller bite size to dos. At the end though you have a team of users that feels listened to, a slightly cleaner system (hopefully) and a huge jump start on moving to Lightning.

What do you think guys, what small steps do you take that have a huge impact?