Salesforce.com Inc. is finally revamping its services with a new user interface that brings it into the modern age.

On Tuesday, Salesforce unveiled the Lightning Experience, a redesigned UI that will deliver users an entirely new way of interacting with the company’s flagship CRM platform.

The Lightning Experience will first be applied to the Salesforce Sales Cloud, the company’s core web-based CRM application. According to Salesforce, the Sales Cloud has been given its first major facelift in other a decade, and will soon pack in more than 25 new features, while streamlining the existing ones.

“This is not just a change of fonts and colors,” Will Moxley, SVP of product management for Sales Cloud, told ZDNet.

The new Lightning Experience design shunts the main options menu to the left-hand side of the page, with information summaries in the center. Dashboards can now contain more than three columns, and the new design should allow many tasks to be accomplished with just one click, as opposed to three clicks with the old interface. Some of the new features include suggested ‘next actions’ to advance relationships with contacts, and the UI also shows news about top contacts. Users can also send files and email contacts directly from the Sales Cloud — there’s no need to use external services, as before. Then there’s the Pipeline Dashboard, a new tool for visualizing the status of deals.

Salesforce introduced its Lightning brand last October with the announcement of its Salesforce1 Lightning Framework, a developer toolkit for building and customizing mobile apps. The new UI is based on the same modular, model-view-controller and API framework as the one used in its mobile applications, and the result is essentially one platform as the basis for all applications whether accessed via desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. User interfaces will be formatted depending on the device used, so, for example, a complex desktop dashboard would be accessible by a series of tabs on a smartphone.

Salesforce has also unveiled a Lightning Design System to provide CSS to third-party designers, so they can can create apps that conform to the new look. The Lightning Design System joins the Lightning App Builder and includes style guidelines, design patterns and a component library to help developers create enterprise applications.

Separately, Salesforce has also announced the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, billed as its first “industry specific” product. Financial Services Cloud is built atop of Salesforce1, leverages the Lightning Experience, and is designed to help financial advisors collaborate with their clients better, from any device. Products from Advisor Soft, Informatica and Yodlee are all compatible with the new solution.

Salesforce said its Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud is now availabile in preview, with general availbility slated for this October. Lightning Design System and Lightning App Builder will preview in October before hitting general availability in Q1 of next year. Financial Services Cloud should hit general availability in February 2016.

Image credit: CheeChee Flickr via flickr.com