Don't ruin the go live

[ChrisF323949498]

You’ve spent months designing, coding and testing your new ServiceNow application for your employer/client, and you’re approaching go live.

You’ve got your licensing confirmed and approved, the Change approval has just come through and you Go live.

Technically everything is brilliant, Script includes are clean and all the bugs were fixed.

Except, your users 'hate' it.

Users immediately report ‘bugs’ and the sentiment of your application is poor.

I see this time and time again, the team building it know how it works and think it’s great however they’ve forgotten about their users.

They ticked all the boxes, the lunch and learns were hosted, comms went out, so what went wrong?

They never sold the story.

The lunch and learns were attended, mandated perhaps, but most users were remote, cameras were off, and that awkward silence for questions at the end was deafening.

Sell the story first

1. Why should we care about your new application?
2. How is it going to make my life easier?
3. How much time will it save me?

Then Train them

I’ve found the biggest thing that determines whether people love or hate an application, is how comfortable they are using it. The UI doesn’t have to be pretty, but if they aren’t comfortable using it, they won’t.

So try to reduce fear with

1. Communicating that they (hopefully) can’t break much, or things can be reversed if they do.
2. In application guidance – Tooltips for fields are a huge win here.
3. and of course, the training sessions and cheat sheets... but sell the story first (above!)

I think if you can sell the story and reduce the fear, the ROI is huge.

Actual things you can do:

1. Sell the story - Keep comms short and pretty - Images are key here! use AI if you need to! 😉
   
   
2. Make it clear - In application add:
   1. Tool tips – When they hover a field it explains it.
   2. Process flow (Formatters) – Showing the step by step process, similar to what you see in Change.
   3. Information messages
      1.       What does this record do?
      2.       What is the next step?
   4. Guided tours – of course.  Link
      
      
3. Keep it fun - Videos – Personally I’ll watch a short video, but reading a large article that isn’t pretty (useful images) is a harder sell.

What are your thoughts to how to improve ROI and reception of your new fancy application? Had any horror stories? Lessons learnt?

Thanks for reading! 😊