ServiceNow — Design process
By: Peter Zalman
Tags: Service Design, Enterprise Technology, Design Process, UX, Product Design

One of the common challenges of Enterprise design is adapting the process to a constrained environment. Constraints I want to evaluate are related to a specific platform — Now by ServiceNow.

“Design is all about finding solutions within constraints. If there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art.” Matias Duarte.

Now Platform

It might start as an IT Service Management solution, often oversimplified to a ticketing system or a relational database with if-this-then-that workflow capabilities. Now Platform in 2018 is rapidly changing into a broader product eco-system where partners and customers run own apps.

Service design

The unique challenge of any service management software is designing for various channels and service stages. This involves designing service portals or mobile apps together with the backstage fulfiller apps matching service process and organizational model. During the design process, we are making countless decisions that are influencing how humans are interacting with these apps based on how they actually behave in an existing organizational model. We are also taking into account how business stakeholders wish they would behave in the future and validating their assumptions.

“Most organizational models don’t align to delivering great customer experiences. It’s human nature to focus on what we can control, so departments create great departmental workflows. Most of the technology developed over past 25 years is very department orientated.” John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO

Understanding how your product fits into an end-to-end user’s workflow (focusing on humans) and organizational model (focusing on business) is an essential starting point for the design process. We are using several effective techniques to define the vision:

Interaction Design

Interaction diagram samples used to define a new ServiceNow business app.

Defining specific user interaction is the next challenge in the iterative design process. We tend to take our initial whiteboard sketches of user flows and transfer them into UI layout using elements and patterns such as buttons, toggles or list views matching these specific requirements.

However, this will not always fly with the out-of-the-box platform behavior. We might be entering a very painful route of customization, often more complex than a greenfield implementation.

ServiceNow developer instance — default portal.

To mitigate this reality check, I recommend spinning own development instance of ServiceNow, and try simulating your specific interaction using predefined demo environment. Sure, you are building an app for travel agents and not IT Helpdesk and your portal will not use 1 column layout and has completely different branding. But existing and available patterns are the reason why you are using (and paying for) the platform, right? If you want to challenge a certain global pattern, it is wise to understand how the existing one works and design the alternative as an evolution or next generation.

A global design pattern sample — Backstage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Out of the box

The power and impact of Now platform come from out-of-the-box capabilities. At the same time, this is a trap for a structured UX design process.

My biggest warning and concern goes to the Backstage user interface. There is no secret that the overall UI just mimics database records. When the design process is heavily influenced by technological functions and the delivery pressure, some of these patterns are not challenged but propagated across the service stages directly to service fulfillers and portal app user interfaces.

Just the existence of a default UI element does not guarantee, that using it in a specific workflow would be successful for your users and your company organizational model. When the existence of a component or pattern is used as a reason to include the feature in your product, always refer to ethnographic user research or aim for quick usability testing targeting your audiences — both service and backstage users.

I suggest overcoming initial frustration and work around the constraints, there is always a lot you can do. Maybe you cannot change the list view filter global pattern, but you can work around the specific challenge and match the user’s mental model by creating a predefined view related to the selected role.

Design Guidelines

Underlying principles of good design practice are the same for B2C, B2B, enterprise software, or a public website. But the execution within ServiceNow ecosystem might be fundamentally different.

Conclusions

Service design and ServiceNow platform is the next level challenge on every aspect of the design process. More constraints, more variables, more problems. Designing complex systems is never a greenfield exercise. Adapting the design process to the constraints is a key to success, but also a very interesting career and professional development opportunity. I am learning new things every day, improving my knowledge and skills while still grounding my actions in a transparent and repetitive goal-directed design process.