Implementation, customization, building mobile apps, these are just a few ways one of our partners Tquila ANZ helps clients easily and quickly engage with their customers and employees. Curious how things changed when Tquila first partnered with Skuid back in 2014, I spoke with Gary Breavington, a senior technical consultant at Tquila ANZ.
What were you using before Skuid?
Before Skuid, going beyond what the standard Salesforce screens offer meant building custom Visualforce pages. This approach works, but can be a lot of effort for something that should be achievable with standard functionality.
What frustrations did you face with Visualforce?
Designing pages with customers is more art than science. Customers may not understand the technical underpinnings, and therefore things may be lost in translation, which may not come out until the screen is nearly complete.
It's only once a customer sees a page that they truly understand what has been built, and all the nuances of the page and the user experience.
After this, there will be feedback to incorporate. Even with good coding practices, the initial build and subsequent changes take time. There's too much lag between customer feedback and [when they see] the results.
What was the big a-ha moment when you decided you needed to try something new?
When we saw Skuid. Someone had invested the time to build out highly re-usable components that were configurable enough that they could be re-used in a lot of places, but configurable and extendable in ways that didn't require a lot of plumbing of disparate components, written at different times for different reasons.
What were the top reasons you selected Skuid?
Speed and ease of delivery of custom user interfaces that work the way you want them to work. Skuid cuts down our need for custom development, which means there's more time for conversations with customers about things that matter rather than implementation details.
How easy or hard was it to get started with Skuid?
It's easy to get going. We made a point initially to try and do as much as possible without having to resort to Javascript snippets, and you can cover a lot of ground doing that. The fact that you can also install it in a developer org and register for a perpetual license is also great, it allows you to explore Skuid at your leisure.
How has Skuid helped you overcome the challenges you previously faced?
Pages can be built much quicker, and therefore can land in front of users quicker. That means you're getting feedback sooner, and also quickly delivering useful functionality.
What is your favorite feature? Why?
It's hard to pick a favorite feature... I first read about external objects in the Banzai release whilst on a bus heading into work, I can't remember exactly how I reacted, but I do remember people around me giving me strange, sideway glances.
Apart from that, there are all these "small" features that when you see them for the first time and realize what they are, you can't quite believe that something that powerful is just a checkbox away.
Want to filter what's shown in a table according to something the user typed in? Check a box. And you just grin to yourself when you see that it actually works.It's kind of boring but I have huge respect and admiration for the way Models work in Skuid.
Models hold your data and get rendered into components, and its components usually get the attention, they are the visual element of your pages, after all. But those components wouldn't have anything to display without Models. The engine behind that is the rock on which the rest of Skuid is built.
How has Skuid helped you achieve your business goals?
One project I worked on had extremely tight deadlines, and custom development introduced risks to meeting their deadlines. By using Skuid (and Process Builder, which was a new feature back then), we ended up going live with around 200 lines of Apex code.
That project had about 30 pages - that's 30 controllers that didn't need writing, and 30 controllers that didn't need test classes writing to give coverage to boilerplate code.
What is the single biggest reason you would recommend Skuid?
I'll cheat and pick two:
- Reducing UI build effort, with a set of components that cover a ton of use cases and that don't require you to write (and test) a lot boilerplate code.
- Giving our customers this power. I've not covered this in previous answers, but I recommend our customers invest time in learning Skuid, because it reduces the reliance on developers to make changes, or even new pages and experiences.
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