Can you imagine how many mouse clicks you can save by being able to edit Salesforce data inline; without hitting the  button and refreshing the screen so many times?

Inline data editing has long been a desire of a huge number of users.  It adds convenience, saves time, and look at the features they’ve thought of already in their prototype that some of us might not have thought of.

As you roll your mouse over the detail page of a record, you’ll see the background change and icons appear that indicate whether that field is editable or read only.  As you click on an editable field, it highlights the test already there.  (You don’t have to backspace over it)  If it’s a lookup field, the lookup magnifying glass is right there, ready to help you search for it.  And there’s an Undo button so you can back up if you accidentally input bad data or erased the previous value. 

Once you leave a field you’ve edited, the field value changes color to indicate your changes have not yet been saved in Salesforce.  One click on the Undo button on any of those changed fields returns the original value of the field.

When you’re done editing all the fields, hit the Save button.  If you try and navigate away from the record before hitting Save, you are alerted with a message that your changes have not yet been saved and asks if you really want to leave that page. 

That’s a high level overview of this new prototyped feature.  Personally, I had no idea they were this far in developing it.  I’m thrilled to see it though and I encourage everyone to go out and try the prototype.  Does it do what you expected it to do?  How does your experience with any other web applications with inline data editing compare?   Are there any missing features you’d like to see in it?  The place to put all these comments is on the User Experience blog.  They’re asking for our ideas, give ‘em all you’ve got.

Technorati Tags: usability testing, salesforce.com, crm, inline editing