Navigating Lightning Experience

Navigating Lightning Experience

Lightning Experience is the modern Salesforce user interface. When you log in you land on your home page. Along the top is the navigation bar with tabs for the objects in your current app, and on the far left the waffle icon opens the App Launcher — the menu of every app and item you can access. Apps are just curated sets of tabs; switching apps changes which tabs you see, not your data.

Click an object tab such as Accounts and you get a list view: a filtered, sortable table of records. List views are one of the most useful everyday tools — you can create your own, filter by any field, and switch between them from the dropdown at the top. Open a single record and you're on a record page, which is organised into the highlights panel, tabs or sections of fields, and related lists that show connected records like an account's contacts and opportunities.

The global search box at the top searches across objects at once — start typing a name and Salesforce returns matching records grouped by type. The gear icon in the top right opens Setup, where all configuration lives; keep that mental separation in mind: the app is where you do business, Setup is where you configure. The bell icon shows notifications, and your avatar controls personal settings.

Two shortcuts pay off immediately. First, favourite frequently used records and list views with the star icon so they're one click away. Second, learn the difference between editing a single field inline (click the pencil next to it) and opening the full edit modal. Spend a few minutes creating an account, adding a contact to it, and logging an activity. Once moving around feels natural, we can talk about what all this data actually is — objects, records, and fields — in the next lesson.