UI Builder - Opinions and Insight

[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. 

My last several blog posts have been a review of some of the technical capabilities of UI Builder. Hopefully they're helpful to anyone trying to figure out UIB on the Quebec release. I'm going to switch gears a bit on this one and put down some personal thoughts on this new capability from ServiceNow. 

It's clear to me that ServiceNow is going 'all in' on UXF and UIB. This is the future of building elegant, powerful and tailored user experiences on the NOW platform. I love that we can now use this same WYSIWYG editor to construct both portal and workspace experiences. I believe it is ServiceNow's intention to eventually have all users of their platform interact with it through a workspace experience or portal experience, apart from the system administrators who live in the 'standard UI' and Studio interfaces.  

That goal (again, it's my guess this is their goal) won't happen overnight. While Quebec is shipping with a very capable version of UIB, the baseline portals and workspaces which come with SN still run on the same technology they've been using for years. However, what you may see soon are more custom apps available in the ServiceNow store which may embrace the new UIB technology. My guess...and it truly is a guess, is that ServiceNow will spend the next few releases re-platforming the many existing workspaces and portals onto this new UXF and UIB tech. 

Should you use UI Builder to create your portals and workspaces on new Phase 1 projects now? If I had to give an answer, not knowing any specifics about the project or company, my answer would be no. Not because UIB is bad or not the future of the platform. It is awesome and it is the future of the platform.

When running a phase 1 now, we ask our clients if they intend to use the workspace UI's which come with the platform. If so, we just ensure their agents can access them and perhaps do a little configuration work to dial in some requirements. Building a workspace Experience can only be done from the bare bones and by hand from the ground up. There is no fast track through this process yet.  

If our project includes a portal, it's common to take the ootb portal and modify it rather than starting from scratch. If we use UIB to create a portal experience, we are building the portal from nothing just like a workspace experience.

There also is a steep learning curve when it comes to being proficient in UIB. This is one of the reasons for my last several blogs on the topic. I'm sure ServiceNow is also working on content for the nowlearning site as fast as they can, but it would be a little rough for the average customer developer to have the pressure of building out their company's new portal under a project's timeline at this point.

Lastly, for the Portal Experience specifically, it feels like some basic functionality is not in the Q release of UIB. there is no shopping cart component. There is no digital signature intake component. And most importantly, Portal Experiences built with UIB are NOT responsive design...no bootstrap compatibility. That's a show stopper right there for most customers who take a mobile-first approach to the platform. I'm confident we'll see ServiceNow address these issues in future release of UIB.

When you add these reasons up, it leads to spending many more hours on a project with a high potential of hitting 'system limitations'. And for that reason, most customers will continue to use existing workspaces and portals (which are wonderfully capable as-is by the way). There will always be the type of customers who can't resist the 'shiny new toy' being offered by ServiceNow, and for those who go down that path, they will be set for the future and in a really good place. The rest of the customers have plenty of time to get there...no rush.