Advice for Building Employee Center Portal from scratch

[brandonjoyce]

I’m leading the initiative to build our organization’s Employee Center portal from the ground up. Currently, we use ServiceNow primarily as a ticketing system, but we’re aiming to shift (not completely) toward self-service enablement for our users.

We want to create a portal that’s intuitive, easy to navigate, and genuinely helpful—especially for common IT requests. I’ve reviewed some of the basics and attended the “Introduction to Employee Center” course, and we’re considering the “Jumpstart Your Employee Center” accelerator as well.

For those who’ve gone through this journey, I’d love to hear:

• What lessons learned or pitfalls to avoid?
• Which features or widgets proved most valuable for driving adoption?
• How did you approach content organization and taxonomy?

We’re especially interested in making the portal a true “digital front door” for employees, not just a prettier ticket form. Any insights or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[YaswanthKurre]

Hi @brandonjoyce ,

We customized a cloned Employee Center portal from scratch, designing a self-service homepage with key adoption features like My active tasks, quick links, and a targeted taxonomy.

For taxonomy, we must prioritize the employee's perspective and drive self-service. Here is what we followed:

• Name your categories and services based on what the employee is trying to do (e.g., Get Software, Fix Hardware, Request Time Off), not the team that fulfills it (e.g., Network Support, HRIS Team).

•  Limit your high-level navigation (Topics/Categories like IT, HR, Facilities) to a small, manageable number. Over-categorization leads to confusion.

For Widgets regarding My Tasks/ My Requests and Ticket page:

• You do not have to customize the widgets for showing My Tasks and My Requests. These functionalities are available OOB and are highly configurable.
• Use Standard ticket configuration to define your actions on ticket page
• Use Page Route Maps effectively. This allows you to route users to the correct viewing page based on the record type.

Hope these helps, and mark this as helpful and correct.

Thanks,

Yaswanth