In the Activating Next Experience article, I guided you through the steps to take in order to enable Next Experience UI in your instance. I briefly touched base on how you can configure Next Experience UI, but will go a little deeper in this article. This article does not cover how to configure experiences in UI Builder, for more information on UI Builder check out our UI Builder resources.
Theming
More than likely you're going to want to brand your instance with your organization's colors. Next Experience is shipped with a default out-of-the-box theme called Polaris.
There are quite a few resources to get you started on theming. We've launched a NowLearning course named Customize an Organization's ServiceNow Theme which explains how to theme an instance with Next Experience enabled, it also goes into detail on how to theme a Workspace when Next Experience is disabled, which we've also covered in our theming fundamentals article.
If you want to know more about theming architecture, I suggest checking out the product documentation to learn about Compositional themes and how Style records work within a theme. This new theming architecture enables you to granularly control more styles in a theme, and allows for styles to be reusable so that you don't have to duplicate style elements across multiple themes.
If you're ready to jump in and start with your first Next Experience theme, see our article how to create your first theme, and when you're ready to apply different themes across your instances we have an article for that as well. If you're looking on guidance on how to replace the Core UI themes there's an article for that as well.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a starting page for a user in Next Experience. These pages can be configured towards multiple personas and configured in UI Builder. If you're a new or zBoot San Diego+ customer, you'll have the landing page for Next Experience already available to you. You may want to use this landing page as is, or begin adjusting it to your organization's needs by creating a new variant. Like any new implementation, you'll need to decide which personas you're building for, and what their needs are to tailor the landing page to them.
If you're an upgrade customer, you'll notice your home settings have been retained, so your users can continue to utilize their dashboards as normal while you begin to define your landing page personas and learn UI Builder.
New in Tokyo: Users can select their own start page. So they can use the default landing page, dashboards, the page they are currently on, or where they last logged off from. See our product documentation for more information.
We have product documentation on how to implement landing pages, the differences in landing pages versus dashboards, and even how to roll out specific landing pages per-user so that you can start a phased approach of moving certain personas over to landing pages. Whether you're a new customer or upgrade customer you can decide if dashboards or landing pages work best for you right after activating Next Experience, then decide the approach on how to roll out landing pages once your requirements have been defined, and your development teams are ready to begin building in UI Builder. If you're looking on guidance on how to configure a landing page, we've created a getting started article where we walk through modifying the out-of-the-box landing page to fit a manager persona.
Banner Announcements
Banner announcements are a new feature in Next Experience and are separate from Service Portal and/or Employee Center announcements. These announcements are displayed to the user when they first login using Next Experience and are not extendable to the Core UI. We have product documentation on banner announcements as well as a getting started article on setting them up.
