Salesforce Through Your Users' Eyes: Why UI Reviews Matter
Your Salesforce org works hard for you every day, but when was the last time you looked at it the way your users do? Most orgs grow one decision at a time: a field added for a report, a picklist value created for a program that ended, a button someone requested once. None of these choices were wrong, but together they can leave your team navigating around the history of an org instead of working with it.
It creates problems people can work around with extra time and effort, but it doesn’t usually stop them completely, which is exactly why it goes unaddressed. It looks like a few extra clicks, a moment of hesitation, the moments where newer staff need veteran team members to explain what fields mean. Over time, those small costs turn into slower work and inconsistent data.
Quiet workarounds should worry every admin. This is what separates truly functional platforms from the ones teams use to simply get by. When users say "Salesforce is confusing," they usually do not mean the platform. They mean the layer of accumulated decisions sitting between them and their work.
A UI review is how you find that layer. It is a simple concept, the person leading the review logs in as a specific user profile, experiences the screens the way that person would, and documents everything that feels confusing, cluttered, or unnecessary.
A Good Review Starts Before Anyone Logs In
It can sound so simple as to be unnecessary, and a meaningful review is more than a stroll through a bunch of record pages. A functional UI review starts with understanding the people behind the profiles. What does each user actually do on a typical day? Which objects do they live in? What they complain about (or wish they could complain about?) and most importantly, which tasks do they avoid because the system fights them? That last question is gold.
Avoided tasks are where your data quality problems come from, and they rarely come up unless someone asks directly. With that in mind, an excellent UI review moves from being a generic checklist and becomes an evaluation that makes the system support and improve the actual work.
What A Good Review Covers
From there, the review works through five areas, one profile at a time, because what works for administrative staff may be a mess for a program manager.
- First Impressions. Land on a record and give yourself five seconds. Can you tell what it is about? The highlights panel is your most valuable real estate, and too often it shows Record ID or Last Modified Date instead of a status, a key date, or a primary contact.
- Fields and Labels. Every org has a field like "TA Ref Code" with no help text and no obvious owner. Look for labels that require guessing, fields that are empty on every record, and picklist values literally labeled "Do Not Use" that are still active.
- Layout and Organization. Seven sections with two or three fields each feel fragmented. Ask whether the information this user needs most sits at the top, and whether the related lists they touch daily are buried below ones they never open.
- Navigation. Trim tabs the profile never uses, retire list views named "Jenny's View 2019," and pin a clean default so users do not land on "Recently Viewed" every time.
- Actions and Buttons. Look for duplicates, click everything to catch buttons that error out against retired tools, add quick actions for the tasks users perform daily, and put the most frequent actions first.
Why Fresh Eyes Make the Difference
Here is the honest truth: an admin can absolutely run this exercise themselves, and any cleanup is better than none. But there is a reason organizations bring in an outside reviewer, and it is not technical skill. It is distance.
When you have worked in an org for years, you stop seeing it. You know what "TA Ref Code" means, so the missing help text is invisible to you. You have scrolled past the empty Legacy Fields section so many times it no longer registers. Familiarity hides exactly the problems a new user trips over, and you cannot un-know your own institutional knowledge.
An experienced outside reviewer brings two things at once: the genuine confusion of a first-time user and the expertise to know what to do about it. They can tell the difference between a field that should be removed from a layout and one that should be deleted entirely. They know which fixes live safely in Lightning App Builder and which ones touch automation or integrations and deserve more care. And because they have seen dozens of orgs, they can prioritize, turning a hundred observations into the three to five changes that will actually move the needle, rather than handing you an overwhelming list.
How to Start Your UI Review
The encouraging part is that most of what a review surfaces requires no development work at all. Highlights panels, section consolidation, related list order, picklist cleanup, and pinned list views all live in standard admin tools, and a focused review often produces a punch list that can be worked through in an afternoon.
Change takes time and planning, but it is important to start somewhere. Whether that is blocking two hours to log in as one of your own profiles or asking someone with fresh eyes to do it for you, the question to answer is the same: would this make sense to someone seeing it for the first time? Done well, this can save time and money, and more importantly, free your team from avoidable frustration.
Have you done a comprehensive UI review of your org? Would you like to have help going through the steps? Arkus is happy to support however we can. Reach out to our team through LinkedIn or our contact form.
