Allow users to switch between Next Experience UI and UI16

[Maik Skoddow]

We all know the "Switch to UI15" button in the personal preferences' dialog, which allows the nostalgic among us to go back a few years in ServiceNow's UI evolution:

And wouldn't it be great to have another button in the same place to jump to the next stage of the UI evolution called "Next Experience"? And indeed there is such a button "Enable Unified Navigation" and no, this is not an image montage:

The prerequisite for this is, of course, that your instance has the San Diego release. But then the only configuration to be done is setting the system property glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled to "true".

Having activated the "Next Experience" you can find a corresponding switch in the Display preferences:

[kimreverman]

Greetings Maik,

Thank you for posting this property.  Since I did an upgrade of my dev instance the property didn't exist. Once I added the property, the button appeared!

[Maik Skoddow]

👍

[Erik24]

Hi,

It seems I cannot find glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled. I activated the new UI across the platform but would rather have a switch in my PDI, so I would like to go back to UI16 and change that.

Do I need to do anything to find the property for user pref?

Thanks

[Darin Short]

Per https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1117832, the Next experience "glide.ui.polaris.experience" property should be set to true for the property "glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled" to take effect. 

I performed the following:

• Created "glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled" and set to true
• Set "glide.ui.polaris.experience" = true
• Refreshed browser

After refresh, ALL users will have the Next experience active. I was then able to go to my user icon, click preferences, click display, then Disable Unified navigation. This creates a User preference "glide.ui.polaris.use" set to true.

[Darin Short]

Per https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1117832, the Next experience "glide.ui.polaris.experience" property should be set to true for the property "glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled" to take effect. 

I performed the following:

• Created "glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled" and set to true
• Set "glide.ui.polaris.experience" = true
• Refreshed browser

After refresh, ALL users will have the Next experience active. I was then able to go to my user icon, click preferences, click display, then Disable Unified navigation. This creates a User preference "glide.ui.polaris.use" set to true.

[Julia Allen]

@Darin Short I just did these exact steps and it did NOT work for me. Thoughts?

[BiancaK]

I tried this but does not wok for me 

[BiancaK]

Very helpful thank you so much. It worked for me.

[tsutherland]

You have to create it if it does not already exist. Good luck!

[danno928]

Thank you thank you thank you! Personally, I love the NEXT experience. But this will ensure a smooth transition for the nostalgic folks!

[Nic Omaha]

Is there anyway to do the opposite and keep them on the current UI and let them choose if they want to use the Next Experience? 

[-O-]

Yes, create (or update) a record in sys_user_preference where

• Name is glide.ui.polaris.use
• System is checked
• User is empty
• Type is true | false
• Value is false

Users that have not yet logged on will derive their personal setting from this one.

[Anna Lindblom]

Hi, 

I am able to enable choice to move from Polaris to UI16 but not the other way around. Do you have any idea what I am missing please?
We moved from Rome to Tokyo

User preference glide.ui.polaris.use is true

System property glide.ui.polaris.on_off_user_pref_enabled is true

Thanks

[Christie Shield]

I was able to get this to work so that a user can turn off the new UI, but there is no option for the user to activate the new UI.  Where do I allow that?

[Robert Campbell]

@Christie Shield 

[Robert Campbell]

@Julia Allen and anyone else, you will need to create the user property if it doesn't exist.  Be sure to make it true/false because string didn't work for me.

[Robert Campbell]

How would I set "Turn off Next Experience" to off/false for all users which will allow them to opt into the new UI?  Where are the individual user's preferences stored?

[Robert Campbell]

I figured it out.

1. Ensure the new UI is on in the system preferences.
   1. 
2. Set the user preferences to false so that all users continue to have the old UI.
   1. 
3. Users will need to enable it themselves
   1. 

[Casper6060]

Thanks for this, i actually used it in reverse, i added this attribute and then set it to true to allow me to revert from Next Experience to UI16.

I did this because i was following the theme course and wanted to try the UI 16 version of themes.

[NS]

Has anyone else faced an issue with ServiceNow user interface breaking when switching to UI16? Is this a known issue? When I toggle the "Turn off Next Experience", I get UI16 for a while but after some page loads or the navbar and header menus break and every page load throws me to

/now/nav/ui/classic/params/target/%24pa_dashboards_overview.do%3Fsysparm_border%3Dtrue

At the latest this happens when I log out and back in. In this view I have no navigation menus available at all.

Trying to hit /nav_to.do or /navpage.do does not help either, I get routed back to the url written above.

[Linda_G]

Can we allow only Admins to be able to revert to the old UI? I created the system property that allows everyone to revert back to the old UI, but I want to limit this permission to only those with the admin role.

[dev220]

Thank you very much for sharing.  It worked for me.