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ServiceNow's technology is powerful. This isn't news to anyone reading this blog post. We all know ServiceNow can be the engine to power your company's digital transformation dreams. But if you're not considering User Experience, you're not getting the most out of your ServiceNow investment. Why? Because building great workflows requires more than just great technology. It requires an understanding of the people those workflows serve; their needs, pain points, and goals. In our Knowledge23 Lab session, Patrick Healy and I outlined a 5 step plan to encorporate UX methods and tools into your next business process transformation project. It might seem like a lot to learn at first, but the great news is this plan works for any business process. Whether you are reimagining employee onboarding, finding new efficiencies in supply chain management, or something else entirely, you can use these steps time and time again to build business processes that work for people.    

Many ServiceNow projects involve a large inventory of catalog items, knowledge articles and other content. For users to find the right content efficiently, organization is key. Learn how to gain quick and early insights from your users on how they expect content to be organized using a classic UX method: card sorting.   We've attached a slide deck, example interview script, and example data collection sheet for Knowledge 2023 to help you learn more about card sorting, as well as to practice it on your own!

Here are some additional links including definitions, overviews, and best practices for creating well organized content, taxonomies, and information architecture.   Definitions and Overviews https://www.nngroup.com/articles/taxonomy-101/ Information and Information Architecture - The Big Picture   Content Organization Workshops How to conduct a Card Sort Improving Information Architecture through Card Sorting   Key Performance Indicators Measuring outcomes is an important way to determine how usable your experience is. Here are 4 Questions you can ask and related KPIs to identify if you have a content organization problem.  Can they find it? The task success rate (TSR) - TSR measures number of correctly executed tasks. If a task has a clearly defined endpoint e.g., filling out a form or buying a product – you can measure the TSR. However, it must be clear which objectives you consider a success. It doesn't measure their journey, but can measure how many people were able to get to the end of it. How long did it take to find it? Time-on-task (TOT) - TOT describes the time (in mins and secs) that a user needs to complete a task successfully. The average time-on-task is usually communicated as the final UX KPI. Basically, the shorter the processing time, the better the user experience. How many mistakes did they make when trying to find it? User error rate (URR) - The user error rate, tracks how frequently users make mistakes during a specific task. Measuring this can help you identify where users face difficulties with your product. This information can be used to develop future product updates and UX designs. What percentage of users were able to find it? Conversion Rate (CR) - The conversion rate measures how many people or new visitors complete tasks such as signing up, completing the free trial and converting to a paid account, etc.   Content Organization Creation and Testing Tools Optimal Workshop UserZoom UsabilityTools   Now Learning Course Check out AJ Siegel's Now Learning course on UX Leading Practices!

After almost 12 months in a private pilot, we are excited to invite all of the ServiceNow community to download and leverage our Figma libraries when prototyping customer solutions for Employee Center, Mobile, Classic Environment, and Next Experience.  

Thank you to all of you who attended the Knowledge Leading Practices session "Self Service Leading Practices".  To create more effortless help experiences for your users, check out these resources:  From the Experts: UX Leading Practices - Self-service Self-Service Analytics Success Playbook: Improve self-service with ServiceNow    We'd also love to continue our conversation with you about product UX!  To share your product experiences with the ServiceNow Insights team and help improve how they work, sign up to be a Product Lab member.  

Employee Center has a nice hero illustration with a prompt to search for help. A common pattern I’ve seen is customizing with a Welcome message for the current user. Let’s expand on this a bit and include a diverse welcome message that rotates greetings in different languages.    

Learn how to use the best tool to identify opportunities to improve your workflows​     Changing workflows is really hard.​ It's time consuming and costly. It requires getting buy-in from countless stakeholders who often have competing priorities. When you fail, you can make enemies and burn bridges. Your hard work will go unnoticed and unappreciated as your users will just go back to their old ways of doing things. No matter how bad those ways might be.   That means it's imperative that when we change a workflow, we get it right. So, how do we do it? While transforming a business processes is a complex, multi-step ballet, there is one tool that stands above all others when it comes to finding opportunities to improve your workflows the right way. That tool? The journey map. A journey map is a visual storyline of a user's experience. Don't let word "visual" scare you. Yes, people do make wonderfully beautiful and overwhelmingly ornate journey maps, but that's just for show. To get the real value? All you need is some post-its and a wall or your favorite digital white boarding tool.  A journey map must be based in evidence, not assumptions. They represent real behaviors, not those we imagine. Journey maps can be made based on one user's experience, but they are far more valuable when they represent a summary of multiple, ideally 5-10, users' experiences. This allows you to learn if one person has a unique experience that you should not design around or if there are common challenges across your users. Journey maps can be fairly simple, tracking one type of users', for example all your company's junior attorneys, experience of a workflow. They can also be far more complex, showing how multiple types of users interact to achieve a common goal through a workflow. Both have value. It's when you identify those opportunities for improvement across your user groups that you maximize organizational value. Finally, journey maps can illustrate multiple states or versions of your workflow. The first, the current state journey map, illustrates your users' experience as it is today. This tool allows us to identify pain points, inefficiencies, unmet needs, and opportunities to improve our workflows. The second, the future state journey map, allows you to put that learning to action by charting ideal future state workflows that will help you achieve your goals.  Join this session to learn how to put this powerful tool into action to maximize the value of your investment in ServiceNow. 

What is a task flow analysis?  A step-by-step analysis of how one or many users will interact with a system in order to reach a goal.  Outcomes      Identify key steps a user will take to move through a task  Insights into who will be part of the flow, and where handoffs happen Important information at each step and what user actions are needed  Opportunities to improve the flow  Aligning your stakeholders, PM, design and engineering teams on the experience and challenges users experience completing a task   Participants  6-12 stakeholders that have deep understanding of users and the business process. Ideally you would also have It is ideal to include customers actual users in this stage.   

Planning an implementation can be challenging, to say the least.  Whether you're an internal team or a partner working with a customer, the rules are the same when configuring and customizing a ServiceNow implementation (or building an application from scratch): The user's needs must be considered alongside the business' needs and technical requirements.   Talking to (and if possible, observing) users is one of the best ways to understand their needs and pain points.  User testing, surveys, observation and interviews are some ways gather feedback.    > What methods are you using, and are there any tools that you love?    Also, we know that it can be challenging to be the user advocate in product design and development - especially when business needs and leadership voices dominate the conversation.  While these are both important factors to be considered during the product development lifecycle, they cannot be the only ones.   > How do you have conversations with your stakeholders about the importance of gathering real world feedback from your users to drive product development priorities?   Feel free to post below, and if you want to learn more, check our our "Value of UX" course on Now Learning

As promised, we have gathered some additional resources that may assist you in implementing some of the practices discussed: Mobile Best Practices Guide mobile app creators on using best practice mobile design Mobile Figma Library Quick start your designers with ready-to-use components Mobile Research Help shape the future of ServiceNow Mobile! Get started with ServiceNow mobile apps Customer success center We understand that implementing new practices can be challenging, but we hope that these resources will be helpful in your journey. Thank you once again for attending the session!

Interested in an opportunity to shape the future of ServiceNow products? Join the ServiceNow Product Lab Insiders Program and receive exclusive invites to interactive feedback sessions with our experienced researchers.  ot To