Embracing Salesforce’s Enhanced Lightning UI: What You Need to Know

Salesforce has announced a refresh of its Lightning UI, bringing enhancements in navigation, page load speed, and overall usability. These improvements are designed to provide a more seamless, responsive, and intuitive experience, benefiting users from diverse backgrounds and with varied needs. As Salesforce prepares to roll out these updates over the next couple of months, it’s crucial to understand how these changes might impact your existing setups and testing processes. Here’s what you need to know about the new enhancements and how to ensure your tests remain robust and reliable.

Understanding the New Lightning UI Enhancements

Salesforce’s updated Lightning UI focuses on several key areas:

Improved Organization and Harmony

• Streamlined Navigation: Simplified icons and adaptable spacing make it easier to transition between tasks with minimal cognitive load.
• Clear Indicators of Success and Prioritization: Enhanced use of colors, contrast, and icons helps users quickly identify data and prioritize tasks, reducing errors and improving efficiency.

Improved Performance and Load Times

• Optimized CSS Code: Reduced distracting images and optimized CSS increase compatibility and predictability across different systems and devices.

Enhanced Approachability and Accessibility

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Adherence to these guidelines ensures the UI is usable by people with a range of abilities and needs, including neurodiversity.

Key Design Updates

• Circular Motifs: Inspired by the Salesforce cloud, circular shapes and rounded edges convey friendliness and smoothness.
• Improved Icons: Updated icons enhance legibility at varying scales and improve uniformity across apps.
• Font Sizing and Weights: Revamped type and font scale enhance legibility, bringing forward important data and insights.
• Methodical Color Use: Improved brightness and contrast yield a cleaner, more saturated look with a modern aesthetic.
• Inviting Cues: Tangible aspects like drop shadows and gradients on buttons make the UI more familiar and relatable.

When you put all these elements together, you get an experience that looks and feels less dense, with better readability and easier usability.

Availability of the Lightning UI Enhancements

The availability schedule for the Lightning UI enhancements is as follows:

• June 5, 2024: New and existing instances of Starter Suite and Pro Suite.
• June 27, 2024: New instances of Sales Cloud Professional Edition.
• July 25, 2024: New instances of Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition.

The Impact on Your Tests

While these UI enhancements promise a better user experience, they also necessitate thorough testing to ensure seamless integration with your existing customizations and workflows.

Stable Locators

Tests are less prone to breaking due to UI changes since they are based on more stable metadata rather than the ever-changing DOM.

Expertise in Salesforce Customizations

Handling custom fields and implementations might be challenging. Salesforce’s standard updates are rigorously tested before release, but custom fields and implementations might still be affected. This is where deep expertise in testing customizations, like testing Lightning Web Components (LWC), becomes crucial. Automation offers powerful LWC testing capabilities, ensuring custom components function correctly after updates.

End-to-End Testing Support

Robust end-to-end testing helps organizations validate the functionality and integration of their customizations seamlessly. With Salesforce’s triannual updates and significant UI changes, it’s essential to have a strong testing strategy in place. As the Lightning Experience gains traction among Salesforce customers, many organizations are contemplating the move to the new UI. There are four key strategies for Salesforce Lightning testing, and understanding these will help you plan effectively for the transition.

What Testers Need to Plan for in the New Lightning UI

• Related Lists Have Moved: In Salesforce Classic, related lists are located at the bottom of the record detail page, with quick links at the top for easy navigation and a hovering view of the lists. In Lightning, related lists have been relocated to a separate tab on the detail page, requiring users to click to navigate between details and lists. This change impacts testing by necessitating additional clicks to complete the same process. While this may eventually lead to faster load times, it remains a work in progress.
• Edit Screens Become Overlays: In Lightning, record edit screens now overlay the original screen, unlike in Classic, where separate pages are accessed via independent URLs. This change affects the navigation path for both manual and automated testing. It also presents a challenge for implementations in Salesforce Classic that use custom buttons to pre-populate fields by accessing field IDs, a method known as ‘URL hacking.’ For more information about Lightning alternatives to URL hacking, check out articles by Keith McRae or Michael White's Dreamforce presentation.
• Lookups Have Changed: In Classic, a lookup field opens a dialog box to find the appropriate record. In Lightning, this has been replaced with a dropdown menu with overlays for searching. Additionally, there is a new quick link for creating a new record, which provides a different overlay of the full edit screen for that object.
• Lightning Uses the Aura Open Source Framework: The new Lightning UI is built on the Aura open-source framework, differing from Classic's standard HTML. This presents a compatibility risk for coded test automation. While coded tests generally hook into the underlying architecture of the platform for Salesforce Classic testing, this approach will not work for Salesforce Lightning testing.

If this change affects your organization, there’s no need to panic. You still have time to develop a plan. One option is to completely rebuild your test automation for Salesforce Lightning testing. Ensure you have the necessary resources for rebuilding and allow time for your team to learn how to structure tests in the new framework. Be aware that maintaining both test suites will double your maintenance effort, as many organizations plan to run both Classic and Lightning concurrently for a defined period. Alternatively, consider investing in a testing solution with an upgrade path that allows testers to run the same tests in both Classic and Lightning without needing a second test suite. By understanding these key changes and planning accordingly, you can ensure a smooth transition to Salesforce Lightning and maintain robust and reliable testing processes.

Conclusion

Salesforce’s upcoming UI enhancements mark an exciting step forward in user experience. With a metadata-driven approach, deep expertise in Salesforce, and powerful capabilities for testing customizations, you can ensure your tests remain strong and reliable. This minimizes disruptions and maximizes efficiency as you navigate these updates and any others that may come in the future. Stay prepared and equipped to handle these changes, ensuring your Salesforce environment continues to thrive.