UI Builder - Components

[Chris Pearson]

Disclaimer: The ideas, thoughts, and opinions in this post reflect my own views and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer, Accenture. 

UI Builder has been around, lurking in hidden parts of the platform since Orlando, but it's going to hit with a BANG in Quebec. It was not really anything to write home about originally, and with only a handful of components available, and certainly not usable outside of niche use cases. 

ServiceNow purposefully held back from releasing small, incremental improvements to UIB so that they could focus on building a complete library of components. Now in Quebec, UI Builder is ready to be used to create beautiful, fully functional ServiceNow workspace and portal Experiences with over 100 different components to choose from. 

Components are the building blocks of an Experience. You can think of these similar to 'widgets' in the Service Portal world. Some of this is just getting used to some new terminology...Experiences instead of Portals. Components instead of Widgets.

What's great with the library that ServiceNow has put together is that there are plenty of components that are ideal for a workspace experience and others which feel at home in a portal experience, each of which have their own inherent styles. Although, the majority of components look at home in either type of experience. 

All of the common ServiceNow-specific UI elements we've become accustomed to are available to choose from.

Some of the highlights are:

• Activity Stream
• Agent Chat
• Avatar
• Breadcrumbs
• Button
• Catalog Item
• List
• Login
• Search Input
• Star Rating

Each component has its own set of available configuration options, making the use of these pre-built components very easy to use and get working. And that's really the goal of UI Builder, to allow for an easy, yet powerful interface to build custom experiences on the NOW platform. 

With Quebec, I believe most customers will gravitate towards experiences and UIB for any custom app work they're doing. But soon, customers won't be able to resist the 'shiny new toy' ServiceNow is offering and will want to convert their existing workspaces and portals to 'Experiences' using UIB. And I'm certain that ServiceNow will be re-platforming their existing OOTB workspaces and portals to new Experiences...the only question is how fast that will happen?

I'm predicting this will end up feeling a lot like when we transitioned from CMS Portals to Service Portals, which took a couple years to really flush through the full community with early adopters leading the charge.