We've been on a journey with Guided Tours since the launch of Next Experience in San Diego. Previously, Guided Tours were no longer accessible (except in the Service Portal) in the Classic Environment when Next Experience is activated.
Classic Environment - The forms, lists, UI Pages, that load within the Next Experience frame. For more information on architecture and terminology see this article.
What's New
Guided Tours are supported in Next Experience UI as of the following:
San Diego Patch 9
Tokyo Patch 4
Utah Family Release
Where can Guided Tours be used?
As mentioned when your instance has been upgraded to one of the above patches, you'll now see the option to create and configure Guided Tours in the All menu with Next Experience enabled.
You can perform the following actions:
- Create and run new tours on Classic Environment pages with Next Experienced turned on
- Run existing tours (from pre-San Diego) with Next Experience turned on
- Continue to create and run Guided Tours on your Service Portal(s) as they were not impacted with San Diego/Next Experience and should continue to function as normal
- Utilize tours on the Next Experience Unified Navigation menu, such as tours on elements such as the All, Favorites, Workspace, etc. menus.
Example Tour on Next Experience UI
In this example we're going to create a Guided Tour on the Next Experience Unified Navigation menu to assist users in navigating the new menu structure. I've also included this in a global update set so you can download it to a PDI and play around with it and modify it as necessary.
1. The first step is to create a new Guided Tour by heading to All > Guided Tour Designer > Create Tour
In my example, I'm still using the Classic Dashboards ($pa_dashboards.do) that were retained when I upgraded to San Diego. If you're a new or zBoot customer, you'll automatically use the Next Experience landing page by default, (/now/navi/ui/home), this is found within the glide.login.home system property. You can set the tour URL to your login page. If you have particular users dropping into a workspace landing page you could configure a separate tour for that as well. The my_home_navigation_page user preference is used for users who have different 'home' pages than the one defined in the glide.login.home system property. For more information see this product documentation.
Also in Tokyo, users can set their own homepages if the administrator has enabled this property, so while this solution may work upon first login for most use cases, configuring other triggers for the tour may be useful if the users needs to revisit it.
2. In this example we'll create a new Custom tour, name it Unified Navigation Overview and set the page to $pa_dashboard. In this example, all roles can see this tour but you can limit the tour to specific roles if needed.
3. Then create the introduction, steps, and conclusion for the tour in the Guided Tour Designer. This tour is geared towards a self-service or fulfiller user, so it won't cover any of the scope picker steps. The length and content of the tour is up to you. All you need to do is launch the designer, place the callouts where you want them on the Unified Navigation header, and provide content. It is recommended to test the tour out with the audience that will be using it to ensure the steps work for them.
4. Set the tour to Auto Launch by navigating to Guided Tour Designer > Configure Auto Launch so the user sees it when they first login. The tile will be the page the tour is for and not the name of the tour, so look for $pa_dashboard or the custom page you used. Make sure the tour is published then toggle the Auto Launch preference to on.
As mentioned, this is a basic tour that should accommodate most snc_internal users that you can modify to your needs, but you may need to modify the tour based upon any menus you've created, workspace visibility, and roles. This tour was created with a user who has access to multiple workspaces, so the Workspace menu is visible. If you're creating this tour for users who only have one specific workspace, you'll need to create a copy and modify. If no workspaces are visible, the step will skip.
I've attached an update set that I created in a Tokyo Patch 4 instance, and exported it to another Tokyo Patch 4 instance for testing. As there may be some differences in elements, i.e. Workspace menu, Search, etc. you may encountered a failed step on this tour. I tried to account for a variation of instances - but you may need to go in and adjust the tour as needed.
If you're trying this out in San Diego Patch 9, this tour won't work as there's been some changes between two patches. You could install it and use it for guidance, but I suggest creating your own tour from scratch instead of attempting to use the provided update set. I recommend trying this out in a PDI (once Patch 4 is available) or a Sandbox instance.
What is the Onboarding modal that is shipped with Next Experience?
I do want to take a moment to clarify the onboarding modal users will see when logging in to an instance with Next Experience enabled for the first time, or from the default landing page. This is a feature that is shipped from Adoption Services, called Guidance/Onboarding experience and is a separate feature from Guided tours. Here's the product documentation linking to that feature. If you have Service Operations Workspace installed, you'll notice an Onboarding shipped with that product as well.
I won't cover it here, but I did create a helpful KB that pulled out the images and wording as I know many customers would like their users to continue to have access to that modal window outside of first login and when they are not using the Next Experience Landing Page. The images were pulled from the image library (search for onboarding), but most of them were in an SVG format that Knowledge Articles can't use so I converted them to pngs and attached them to the attached article: kb_knowledge_6e2a0d604710299075cac472846d433d.xml
You could link to this KB from a module or a link on a dashboard, etc. so users have access to this information at their fingertips and modify it to your organization's needs.
Hopefully these resources gave you a good starting point for your user training. Much of the wording for the tour and knowledge article was borrowed from the Welcome to ServiceNow training, which really goes more in depth than the content posted here. This course was created to assist you with onboarding new users into ServiceNow that has not worked with the platform before, but the Access and Navigation section is a great introduction to Next Experience.
If you're looking for more deep dives and training material on Next Experience, check out the following courses:
Next Experience Unified Navigation Overview
Get Started with the Now Platform (Next Experience)
