Create and Customize Lightning Apps | Trailhead Screen Reader Instructions


Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:


What Is a Lightning App?

An app is a collection of items that work together to serve a particular function. In Lightning Experience, Lightning apps give your users access to sets of objects, tabs, and other items all in one convenient bundle in the navigation menu.

Lightning apps let you brand your apps with a custom color and logo. You can even include a utility bar and Lightning page tabs in your Lightning app. Members of your org can work more efficiently by easily switching between apps. What’s most important to sales reps? Accounts, events, and organizations. How about sales managers? Reports and dashboards make the top of the list.

Let’s jump into the details.

 

Each Lightning app has a navigation bar at the top of the page, letting your users:

 

Think of the navigation bar as a container for a set of items and functionality. It’s always there, but the items within it change based on the app you’re using.

 

So what things can you put in a Lightning app?

 

You can even include Lightning page tabs and utilities like Lightning Voice. If your org uses utility features, you can enable a utility bar in your app that allows instant access to productivity tools, like integrated voice, in the Lightning Experience footer.

You can also build your own on-demand apps by grouping items into new custom apps.

To switch between apps, users can use the App Launcher. This makes it easy for users to switch contexts and still have access to the items, objects, and pages they need most.

 

Meet the Lightning Experience App Manager

The App Manager is your go-to place for managing apps for Lightning Experience. It shows all your connected apps and Salesforce apps.

Use the Lightning Experience App Manager to:

 

Note

Within App Manager, you will find a table listing all the currently available apps. You can navigate across the column headers along the top of the table to find expandable menus which will allow you to sort in various ways for each of the columns in the table.

 

What does that “Visible in Lightning” column mean?

You can see in the App Manager that there are two types of apps: Classic and Lightning. A checkmark in the Visible in Lightning Experience column means that the app is accessible in Lightning Experience via the App Launcher and is fully functional.

Classic apps that don’t have a check mark in the Visible in Lightning column are enabled only for our Salesforce Classic UI. Because you’re working in Lightning Experience, you won’t find those Classic-only apps in the App Launcher. Classic apps marked as visible in Lightning Experience are fully usable in Lightning Experience, but they don’t take advantage of the app enhancements that Lightning Experience offers.

 

Create a Lightning App

Creating and editing a Lightning app is a cinch. As Ursa Major Solar’s admin, Maria needs an app that puts everything about customer energy assessments at her consultants’ fingertips. Let’s dive right in and try it out. In a few simple steps, you can give an app a name, set its primary color, upload a logo, specify which items appear in the app’s navigation bar, and assign the app to user profiles.

  1. From the Home tab in Setup, enter App in the Setup search box near the top of the page, then select the result for App Manager.
  2. Activate the New Lightning App button.
  3. Walk through the Lightning App Wizard, creating an app with the parameters from the following table.

 

Note that App Options, Utility Items, Navigation Items, and User Profiles are buttons located near the bottom of the page. These buttons do not work if you press ENTER directly on them. You must progress through the wizard by activating the Next button and then reviewing these buttons to see which has the word Active next to it.

 

App Name Energy Consultations

Description

Track energy audits and product recommendations.

Image

Your choice! Use a JPG, PNG, BMP, or GIF image that’s smaller than 5 MB. For best results, upload an image that’s 128 by 128 pixels. Images larger than the maximum display of 128 by 128 pixels are automatically resized.

Primary Hex Color Value

#FA8B05

Org Theme Options

Select the checkbox.

App Options

Don't change anything.

Utility items

Don’t add any.

Navigation Items

Add these items in this order: Home, Chatter, Groups, Energy Audits, Accounts, Contacts, Products, Tasks

Assigned to user profile

Choose System Administrator. Maria would assign it to her consultants’ user profile, but for our purposes, it’s easier to test if we set it to System Administrator.

 

  1. Activate the Save and Finish button to exit the wizard.
  2. From the App Launcher, find and select Energy Consultations.
  3. Check out the new app!

It’s got all the custom branding you gave it: a custom icon in the upper left and the custom color you assigned to it. Because Home is first in the navigation bar, it becomes the first page your users see when they open the app.

 

Nice work! Now you’re ready to create your own custom Lightning apps.

 

Note

Note

Did you know that app images for Lightning apps can be animated GIFs? Oh yes, they can. You're welcome.

 

Tips for Creating Apps in Lightning Experience

It’s time for the fun part: deciding how to set up Lightning apps for your users. Here are some tips for planning Lightning apps for your org.

Talk to your users. Ask them what their priorities are. Customizing tabs in apps gives you a unique opportunity to engage with your users. Each group of users has its own priorities. Find out which objects and items represent their highest priorities.

Create a master list of objects that everyone in your org wants. Then trim down the list for each group—sales reps, sales managers, execs, and so on. The menus for every user group share some common objects, like Home, Tasks, and Feed. Keep the high-priority items for each group at the top. Put low-priority items at the bottom, or remove them altogether. Users can always go to the App Launcher to get the items they use less often.


Resources



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