Salesforce is one of the most powerful platforms for building applications that help organizations streamline their operations and provide exceptional customer experiences. Whether you’re developing a custom application for your nonprofit, association, or business, Salesforce offers a robust suite of tools to design, build, and deploy applications efficiently. However, building a Salesforce application requires careful planning, strategy, and adherence to best practices to ensure it meets your organization’s needs, is scalable, and integrates well with other systems. In this blog post, we will explore key best practices for Salesforce application development, starting from the planning phase to deployment.
1. Start with Clear Requirements and Objectives
Before you begin any application development on Salesforce, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your organization’s needs and objectives. This is often the most overlooked yet vital step in the process. A well-defined list of requirements ensures that everyone involved in the project is aligned on the final goals.
- Gather Stakeholder Input: Speak with different stakeholders in your organization, such as operations teams, marketing, finance, and IT, to understand their needs and expectations. This helps ensure the application is designed to meet the real-world challenges of the organization.
- Define Key Metrics and Outcomes: Identify what success looks like for your Salesforce application. Are you aiming to streamline operations, improve data management, or boost customer engagement? Defining the success metrics helps track progress and ensures your application delivers value.
2. Leverage Out-of-the-Box Features and Pre-Built Components
Salesforce provides a wide variety of standard features and pre-built components that can save you time and effort during development. By leveraging these features, you can focus on customizing the solution to your specific needs without reinventing the wheel.
- Use Standard Objects: Whenever possible, use Salesforce’s standard objects, like Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Cases, as they are well-documented and supported. This can reduce the complexity of your application and allow for easier updates and maintenance.
- Salesforce AppExchange: Salesforce’s AppExchange offers thousands of pre-built applications and components that can be easily integrated into your Salesforce environment. Look for solutions that meet some of your requirements before building them from scratch. This can speed up your development process significantly.
3. Prioritize User Experience (UX) and Interface Design
A successful Salesforce application isn’t just about functionality—it’s about creating a smooth, intuitive experience for the end-users. An application that’s difficult to navigate or that requires extra steps to perform a task is likely to see low adoption.
- Simplicity: Keep the user interface (UI) clean and simple. Avoid clutter and unnecessary fields. Focus on providing only the information that’s most relevant to the user’s role.
- Personalization: Customize the interface to meet the needs of different users. For example, different teams may need different data sets or reports displayed. Salesforce’s Lightning Experience offers tools to personalize dashboards, layouts, and record pages for specific profiles and use cases.
- Mobile-First Design: Many Salesforce users access the platform from mobile devices. Ensure your application is mobile-responsive and that it works seamlessly across devices. This is especially important if your organization’s staff or volunteers need to access Salesforce on the go.
4. Ensure Data Integrity and Security
Data is at the heart of every Salesforce application, and it’s essential to maintain the highest standards of data integrity and security. Salesforce provides powerful tools to help secure your data and enforce best practices for data management.
- Data Validation Rules: Use validation rules to ensure data is entered correctly and consistently. This can prevent errors that could impact reporting and analysis.
- Field-Level Security: Implement field-level security to ensure that only authorized users can view or edit sensitive data. This is especially important for nonprofits and associations handling personal member or donor information.
- Data Backups: Regularly back up your Salesforce data to avoid potential loss due to system errors or human mistakes. Utilize Salesforce’s native backup options or third-party tools to ensure data security.
5. Design for Scalability
When developing applications on Salesforce, it’s important to think about future growth. Your application should be able to scale as your organization grows, whether that means handling more data, accommodating new users, or adding more functionality.
- Use Custom Objects Wisely: While Salesforce offers flexibility with custom objects, creating too many custom objects or complex relationships can lead to data management challenges. Aim to strike a balance between standard and custom objects to ensure scalability and avoid unnecessary complexity.
- Optimize for Performance: As your data grows, performance can become an issue. Ensure your application is optimized for speed by minimizing the number of fields and records being queried and by using indexed fields where necessary.
- Consider Automation: Use Salesforce’s automation tools like Process Builder, Flow, and Workflow Rules to reduce manual tasks and improve operational efficiency. Automation can help scale operations without needing to add more resources.
6. Test, Test, Test
Testing is a critical part of the Salesforce development process. Before going live, ensure that your application is fully tested under real-world conditions.
- Unit Testing: Use unit testing to verify that individual components of the application are working as expected. Salesforce’s Apex testing framework allows developers to write test classes to verify the functionality of custom code.
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Involve key users in the testing process. This helps ensure that the application meets their needs and that they’re comfortable using it. UAT can also uncover issues that might have been missed during development.
7. Deploy and Continuously Improve
Once your application has been tested and is ready for deployment, ensure that you have a deployment strategy in place. Salesforce offers tools like Change Sets, Salesforce DX, and third-party deployment tools to help with this process.
- Monitor Performance: After deployment, monitor the application’s performance and user adoption. Use Salesforce’s analytics tools to track how the application is performing and where users might be experiencing challenges.
- Iterate and Improve: Salesforce applications are never truly finished. As your organization’s needs change, be ready to iterate on your application, adding new features, improving performance, and addressing any feedback from users.
How Systems Rewired Can Help with Salesforce Application Development
At Systems Rewired, we specialize in Salesforce application development, ensuring that every custom solution we build is tailored to your organization’s needs. From the initial planning phase to the final deployment and continuous improvements, we follow best practices to deliver a solution that is functional, scalable, and user-friendly. Our team is experienced in leveraging Salesforce’s powerful tools and pre-built components to create solutions that meet the unique needs of associations and nonprofits.
If you’re ready to get started with your Salesforce application development or need help optimizing your existing Salesforce solutions, contact Systems Rewired today. We’ll work with you to create an application that supports your mission and drives long-term success.