Service Portal serves as a primary touchpoint for many users of ServiceNow – unless one is a fulfilller or an admin they will typically never leave the Service Portal user interface. In order to satisfy these users, it is vital to provide them with a Service Portal that services their needs with ease and clarity.
The key tenets to remember when designing a Service Portal are:
- Accessible
- It should be able to be used by everyone – regardless of their age, role, physical attributes, or background.
- Digestible
- Those accessing the Service Portal should be able to find what they need with ease.
- Useful
- Fulfills the user’s needs – a comprehensive Service Portal encourages self-service, thus increasing deflection rates.
Let’s go more in depth into each of these tenets:
Accessible
- Review the Accessibility Conformance Reports: These reports outline the conformance level of Service Portal across the criteria set out by the international version of the VPAT, which incorporates WCAG, Revised Section 508, and European Union accessibility standards.
- Enable OOTB accessibility features: You can review the features available for Service Portal by following the documentation provided here.
- Maintain appropriate color contrast ratios: Color contrast ratios assist those who are visually impaired to be able to see the content on your Service Portal. The WCAG 2.1 guidelines state for the minimum contrast ratio for text and images of text must be 4.5:1 for normal text (18-point or larger) and 3:1 for large text (14-point or larger and bold).
- Provide alt text for images and graphics: This enables those who are visually impaired to use your Service Portal with ease. WCAG 2.1 guidelines specify the following requirements for alt text:
- Provide text alternatives for all non-text content: All images, including decorative images, must have alt text that accurately describes their purpose.
- Provide equivalent alternatives: The alt text must provide equivalent information to the visual content of the image.
- Use null alt text: For images that are purely decorative, the alt text should be empty (alt="").
- Avoid using "image of" or "graphic of" in the alt text: The alt text should describe the image, not state that it is an image.
- Be concise: The alt text should be short and concise, usually no more than a few words.
- Test your portal with assistive technologies: Conduct regular testing of your portal with assistive technologies such as JAWS can help identify and resolve any accessibility issues.
- Avoid using jargon or acronyms that users may not understand: Use what makes sense to your users.
- Speak their language, literally: Ensure that the Service Portal is available in every language your users operate in. You can learn more about how to localize your Service Portal here.
- Provide keyboard-only navigation: Users with motor impairments may use the keyboard to navigate your portal.
Digestible
- Leverage pre-built experiences: Consider using the pre-existing portals listed below to jump start your implementation. Each one has been designed by product designers with a focus on end user experience.
- Use white space efficiently: Proper incorporation of white space allows for you to place focus on the items that really matter.
- Strive for consistency within both your visual and functional components:
- Follow your company’s branding guidelines: Colors schemes, fonts, images, and layouts should be consistent across your organization’s products. If you do not have branding guidelines, look to engage your marketing or user experience teams to develop a look and feel that reflects your organization.
- Using a theme can assist with distributing branding across portals.
- Use widgets from the widget library: If custom functionality is required, aim to clone an existing widget to build upon.
- Use variable sets: Variable sets provide consistency within your Service Catalog items.
- Follow your company’s branding guidelines: Colors schemes, fonts, images, and layouts should be consistent across your organization’s products. If you do not have branding guidelines, look to engage your marketing or user experience teams to develop a look and feel that reflects your organization.
- Ensure the user experience does not deviate across your Service Portal: Ask “why” if there is a need to deviate from an existing pattern.
- Include your users when developing your taxonomy: This ensures that the result resonates with them. A guide to this process is available here.
- For users of Employee Center, you can follow the taxonomy best practices guide in this video.
- Remember that consumers are not providers:
- Consider what a user may know: If a field is complex, add additional information.
- Auto-fill what you can on a form: Consider using knowledge gathered from ServiceNow, your integrations, and previous user answers to populate fields for the user.
- Use the right input field types: Some examples are found below, or you can visit the guide here.
- For a small, finite list of inputs use a drop down.
- For larger lists of data, use a reference field.
- Use date/time fields where applicable.
Useful
- Ensure your search coverage is appropriate: Configure your search sources to cover the appropriate landscape of your organization.
- Add useful metadata to catalog and knowledge articles to ensure searches return useful results.
- Ensure that the search bar is prominent and available on every page.
- Adding too many sources may lead to a degradation in performance, so ensure you only include sources that a requester would need to see.
- Promote the display of important information: Display important and/or timely messages such as outages, news, or alerts in a manner that is both easy to see and able to be dismissed.
- Target these announcements based on a user’s location, subscription, role, etc.
- Focus on displaying relevant material: Utilize user roles to ensure that users are only presented with catalog items and knowledge articles that are relevant to them and their roles.
Measuring Success
To track the performance of your Service Portal in these key areas, ensure you are reviewing metrics associated with your Service Portal on a continuous basis using the products below:
Important questions to ask when reviewing your data are:
- What are users searching for? Can we highlight these items on the main page?
- Are the users finding helpful results when using the search option?
- What is/isn’t popular? Does this align with the use cases we had in mind during development?
- What are users saying about our Service Portal?
- Where are users traveling to on the Service Portal?
