The User Experience is Not Just a Pretty Portal

[eric_hemmer]

One of my former directors used an analogy of a car dealership when she took in her vehicle for repairs.   She liked the waiting room where everything was clean and quiet.   She didn't want to know what was happening back in the garage where it was noisy and messy.   The waiting room is like the employee portal, which shields the customer from all the chaos of the actual back office work that is being performed to fulfill a request.

When I shared the analogy with Lisa Rowan, Research Vice President, HR software & services Research at IDC, at HR Tech in 2015 she laughed; but she also advised not to discount the importance of the back office work that has to be performed.   She explained that every software company can plop a nice front end for their own application and refer to it as "engaging", but the difference with ServiceNow is that it offers a nice employee portal for multiple vendor applications.   And, it automates the back office work to be much more efficient; whether that's routing work to the people with the proper skills, escalating approvals, or automatically provisioning account access.   In other words, requests get handled quickly within HR and across the whole organization when using ServiceNow.   So employees get what they need fast, while also enjoying the pretty portal.

The user experience is not just about a pretty user interface.   It's the nice interface plus service management (a.k.a. service delivery)

User Experience (UX) = User Interface (UI) + Service Management (SM)

The analogy I like to use is Uber; if it was just a nice interface, but your car was always late or smelled like rotten eggs, it would be a bad experience.

User Interface (UI) + Bad Service = Bad Experience  

Don't underestimate the value of fast, reliable service when designing your user experience.

#HRNOW

#ServiceNow

#HRTechConf