Four interface design tips to help you improve your form's use efficiency

As the world's most famous customer relationship management software giant, Salesforce has in-depth understanding and excellent design and development experience in CRM software design. In enterprise-class software such as CRM, there are a lot of interfaces in the form class, which also contributed to today's article. What is the quality of a good form? How do you improve the user experience and efficiency of your form? See how the Salesforce team does it.

Salesforce users are dealing with forms every day, whether they are salespeople, supervisors or managers. Therefore, for Salesforce, whether to add, edit and delete information seamlessly is the core factor and driving force to ensure enterprise productivity. This is why Salesforce's UX team takes form design and editing as the core of the new product lightning experience.

　1, Label & field alignment

In Lightning, the label in the form is left-aligned with its corresponding input field, and the label is above the input box. This design can make users more worry and efficient operation, and before the version, users in browsing and operation, only need to move up and down the eye can handle everything, without scanning around.

Everything is left-aligned.

Although the new design will take up more space in the vertical direction, the matching of tags and fields will make the entire interface more visually usable and clear. In order for the user to see more clearly in the input, the pairs of fields and tags will be closer, the gap between the two different groups will be greater. Users can fill out the form more smoothly without scanning the left and right.

In view mode, we use the same principle to design, which makes the information hierarchy more excellent, while ensuring the overall readability.

2, set the default value

If you are a sales person, your job may involve communicating with potential users (i.e. "Leads"). If you want to keep track of these potential users ' information in Salesforce, you usually have to create a corresponding file first. If you do this, you might create the following lead form:

Create a new lead form in Salesforce

It looks simple, doesn't it? But if we take a closer look, we can gradually find out the design of this form in the doorway. The first editable field is the lead state, which contains the following options: No contact, no contact, open status, qualified, unqualified.

Research has shown that setting a default value will lead many people to choose the default option in a variety of contexts and environments. Well, back to the original question, if you're a salesperson, when you first fill out this form when you communicate with a new potential user, you may be more inclined to choose "open state" rather than empty it out.

Well, in most cases, when you create a new lead form, the salesperson chooses "open state." And then each time you create a new type of form, it takes two seconds to make a choice on this field. But if the number of such forms is very large, such as hundreds of, then the cost of this change is very high. This is why you design default values for some fields.

　3, pre-fill related fields

Many of the relevant pages of the record will perform some prefabricated operations based on the publisher, such as creating new tasks and events (the system will help you fill out the Prefab default Inbox, recipient, and phone number when we order Taobao). So let's look at the following page:

Actions triggered after the publisher logs on

The publisher information is automatically filled in by the system

In an ideal state, users will carefully fill in the details of each field, but in fact the user does not.

In this case, the lead form is about a person named Walter Junior, and this is the interface that is displayed after a call is performed. This user-related information contains four fields, and the "name" and "Project" two fields are filled in in advance, because this is a call information interface, so the default fill in the project is "called", and the name of the relevant users do not need to fill out, directly filled in.

Ideally, the user would "diligently" fill in all the fields and describe each detail and related information in detail. In practice, however, people are inert, and operators always have a way of slacking off. Each newly added field is a huge barrier for users to complete the form. To solve this problem, we made a compromise solution: the system pre-filled some of the relevant key content. When a user fills out a form that covers these prefabricated information, the system will help users fill in prefabricated information, so that the four-field form, the user needs to fill out only 2 fields (please continue to the brain replenishment of Taobao when the order, automatically add the recipient information mechanism).

　4, make the form have better accessibility

When designing a new lightning experience, we have a basic idea of its accessibility design. Because keyboard input is still the main input mode for our users (considering that we are an enterprise software), we must be compatible with the keyboard and make sure that the user can perform all the operation with the keyboard only. To this end, we have established a specific keyboard interaction pattern for each form component, and the construction of these patterns is designed to conform to the rules of the Consortium, which also ensures accurate and extensive compatibility of the set of interactions.

This is a date selector component, next to the recommended design pattern in the consortium

However, all of the above rules are not just right, and real heavy users tend to use the keyboard more frequently, and they gain from a truly highly consistent keyboard input experience. How do you judge the ease and reliability of the keyboard interaction? A date selector designed for core users allows them to complete all date selections and necessary edits without having to leave the keyboard with both hands.

　Conclusion: More Questions

Lightning experience is a milestone for the Salesforce UX team, but there are many things to do. For example, we need to enhance the input experience and introduce inline editing.

Regardless of where you are in the team, whether you are designing an interface or writing code, designing a check box or making a more complex CRM program is essential to the design of the form. In many cases, users need to interact and operate with these forms over long periods of time, and any increase in efficiency can lead to a great experience optimization. Be sure to remember that the well-designed interface is not only to ensure the formal beauty, convenient and efficient design is also an important means for the benefit of users.