Help Your Users Learn to Love Lightning Experience

By: Peter White, Project Manager, Arkus Inc.

Once you’ve made the move from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, you’ll want to continue to improve the experience for your users. Follow these tips to increase adoption and ensure your users love working in Lightning Experience.

Time to Optimize

Let’s say you’ve tackled the first two steps in transitioning your org to Lightning Experience. You planned and piloted; you trained and coached; you flipped the switch – and the go live was a complete success! Now it’s time to tackle the third step and optimize your org for Lightning Experience. There are two parts to this: measuring and iterating.

Optimize Lightning: Measure

While you can go live error-free, it’s still likely you will want to adjust as users come on board. It’s best practice at this stage to document anything not working exactly as you want it to and begin work on new use cases that may come along.

To help measure how Lightning is working for your organization, there are a number of tools built by Salesforce for you to use. Make friends with the awesome Lightning Usage App and use this to measure adoption. Metrics from this app can highlight users who are switching back to Salesforce Classic often which is a good indicator of where users are struggling.

The app can also indicate performance issues, including if users are working with a browser that is sluggish. Check out the performance of the most viewed pages. Create custom Report Types utilizing the Lightning App Usage object, as this will allow you to drill into adoption details and create Dashboards based on the Lightning Experience usage metrics.

Salesforce Classic is still an option, and Administrators can enable the Switch to Salesforce Classic Feedback form that will prompt users to provide feedback as to the reasons they are switching back and what they are experiencing.

Periodically run the Salesforce Optimizer report to identify areas that can be improved. This report will provide you with actionable advice and recommendations to continue with your Lightning Experience Optimization.

Optimize Lightning Experience: Tweak

Collect your findings and dig in to make changes by reconfiguring your org. What areas can be optimized? Is the solution technical? Or perhaps more training is needed?

Some of your updates may include updating pages as you get more familiar with how they look and work in Lightning Experience. Make use of the power of Quick Actions here. These allow you to take fields off page layouts and move them to tabs and then display different things by record type, user, or field values. Check out this Dreamforce presentation at minute 23 for more on how they can be used to shorten detail pages that were ten screens long into a user-friendly tabbed layout.

Tweak how new features are being used in this phase or start using them for the very first time after having successfully delivered core functionality in your initial rollout. Use the Related List – Single component when you have one object that has a single related list everyone needs to see more often. Use or update your pinned list views as shown above and make use of the Enhanced Related Lists.

You may also want to make updates to Paths you have built. Dig into the power of reports in Lightning where you can make small report edits without going into full edit mode. Take this time to tweak your reports too.

Connect with your users as you make changes. Use Chatter to shout out when a tweak is in place, share help documentation, thank your team for their awesome work, and collect feedback.

Don’t forget about the Lightning Experience Welcome Mat and In-App Prompts you can use to guide users too. These are both great on-boarding and change management tools that can be customized to fit your organization’s needs as you put changes into place.

As you adjust and encounter places where you know change is needed and aren’t quite sure what to do, head to Trailhead to learn as you go. We recommend this Trailhead Module as a good place to continue your Optimize learning journey.

It will be easier to say when you’ve finished phases one and two. The Optimization stage may continue on for a while. What will you want to make sure was accomplished when you have successfully navigated this third phase? Read on to find out what some of your outcomes will be.

Your Successful Switch to Lightning Experience

A successful optimization will mean you have identified issues and resolved or mitigated them. While gathering user feedback is not limited to the Optimize phase of a Lightning Experience transition, make sure you’re particularly plugged in during this change.

Documentation is key to any well-run Salesforce instance and especially important here. Record feedback along with user adoption metrics and the baseline so you can compare how your tweaks turn out over time.

Continue to support your users with on-going training and configurations. Apply lessons learned at every stage. Some of theses outcomes can be checked as done as you go and some may continue on for awhile as you measure results and optimize until you hit your goals. Of course, you can continue to customize and optimize Salesforce for your organization indefinitely. At a certain point you can rest easy knowing you helped your users successfully make the leap from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience.

For more information, check out the Lightning Experience Performance Optimization Trailhead module.

Join us for the next “Ask Me Anything” in the Power of Us Hub on October 15th at 9am PT to get answers to all your Lightning optimization questions!

Arkus is a Salesforce.org Premium Partner and Nonprofit Program Management & Mission Measurement Specialist that helps nonprofits succeed with Nonprofit Cloud and helps educational institutions succeed with Education Cloud.

About the Author

Peter White is a Project Manager at Arkus, Inc. who holds seven Salesforce certifications. He lives in Massachusetts and enjoys music and the outdoors when not immersed in Trailhead. Reach out in the Power of Us Hub.