Users are swimming in a sea of data. Each time you look at a record in Salesforce, how many of the fields on a page layout are blank? Blank fields are not always a sign of data quality issues. They may just not have or need any data. Why does a user need to see those fields?

What I am suggesting is the ability at the field level, within a page layout, to allow an administrator to say whether the field should always show up on the page layout or whether it can be conditionally suppressed because that field contains no data. These blank fields would not be suppressed from the Edit screen as the edit must contain all editable fields.

A practical way of communicating to users that there are blank fields that are not displayed on the page is to display a count of the number of “hidden” blank fields in the button bar for each record. Next to that would be a link to “Show All Fields.” After the view refreshes, the link could be changed to “Hide Blank Fields.”

An example of this on a Contact record would be a field such as Assistant and Asst. Phone. If this person has no assistant, why should the screen be littered with field labels and blank fields? Users want to find the data they want, not see blank and wasted space. Another example from the account object could be almost any custom field such as Tax ID. If there is no data in the field, don’t force the user to see the blank space and look past it. There is a bountiful list of fields that may not be important to be displayed if they’re blank. Take a look at what your users are seeing.

To manage this option, it would be included in the setup of new fields as well as within page layouts. During custom field setup, the option to conditionally suppress the field would be offered in the “Add to Page Layouts” page as shown below. For fields which have already been created, on the page layout, double clicking on field would offer the option to conditionally display/suppress the field. Additionally, a new icon would be added to the legend and each conditionally displayed field to indicate whether it is conditional.

The key is that the administrator is in control of whether the field will be displayed. If you always want the field to show, it will always be there.

The question is, ff you can clean up the detail record view for your users, will they be able to find what they are looking for faster? And if they get what they’re looking for faster, will that lead to higher adoption, increased productivity, and higher user satisfaction?