Great experiences should improve productivity and value, but investments in user experience often fail to ‘go to the source’ to understand where productivity can be improved.
We’ve identified three essentials that successful ServiceNow customers use to guide their investments in user experience.
Essential 1: Tailor the user experience design based on user needs
The challenge with most approaches to UX is that they try to design the perfect experience without first taking the time to understand the user. If you’re going to design an experience that fits your user base, you need to develop a fine-grain understanding of what your users need. The basic set of questions you need to answer to understand user needs include:
- Who are your users?
- What outcomes do they expect to enable (e.g., less time on tasks, lower error rates)?
- What triggers their need? Is it on a schedule or initiated by some external event?
- What process or workflow does a typical user follow?
- What risks are associated with the usage from both the user’s and the organization’s perspective?
- What would be the ideal experience for the user? How do you envision them talking about the solution once it’s live?
A great way to capture and share this understanding with stakeholders is through “user personas” – a profile of a typical user. The process of creating user personas typically includes conducting quantitative research (i.e. questionnaires, usage data), interviewing small groups of users, identifying user patterns, and creating personas. For an editable template to get started and additional information on how to build a user persona, see here.
Essential 2: Engage users throughout the design process
Your users are most familiar with how they can make the best use of ServiceNow to resolve their need quickly and efficiently. Yet most approaches to UX design focus on soliciting feedback after the design is complete. Instead, make designing the ideal experience an iterative process, engaging users to ideate on flow designs and experiment with the solutions using mock-ups.
Start by co-designing with a small, representative group of user types. Opportunities to engage users in your design activities include:
- Review and prioritize requirements – Conduct card-sorting exercises.
- Co-design wireframes – Use paper and sticky notes to start the design from scratch and avoid any pre-existing biases on the experience flow. Remember this is about the actual flow of the experience—not the look and feel.
- Co-design the UI’s look and feel. Make the development effort iterative by creating the experience in chunks (or use cases) that process users can experiment with, and provide feedback on, in real-time.
Essential 3: Separate process issues from design
Not all pain points in the user experience are rooted in design or can be solved with design improvements. Sometimes, it’s the workflow or process that needs revisiting. Work with process owners to determine if known issues can be resolved with process change. Some customers have made improvements in UX just by assigning an owner for an activity, or driving awareness of an under-used feature.
Start by mapping the current “as-is” process and use the process of elimination to determine where workflow or process missteps are impacting user experience. Use the table below to get started:
For additional details on designing effective ServiceNow user experience, explore our Success Playbooks Improve self-service with ServiceNow and Design an optimal agent and rep experience.
Pooja Gupta, Research Manager, Best Practices Center of Excellence – Customers Success at ServiceNow
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