Service design
The unique challenge of any service management software is designing for various channels and service stages. This involves designing service portals or mobile apps together with the backstage fulfiller apps matching service process and organizational model. During the design process, we are making countless decisions that are influencing how humans are interacting with these apps based on how they actually behave in an existing organizational model. We are also taking into account how business stakeholders wish they would behave in the future and validating their assumptions.
“Most organizational models don’t align to delivering great customer experiences. It’s human nature to focus on what we can control, so departments create great departmental workflows. Most of the technology developed over the past 25 years is very department orientated.” John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO
Understanding how your product fits into an end-to-end user’s workflow (focusing on humans) and organizational model (focusing on business) is an essential starting point for the design process. We are using two effective techniques to define the vision:
- User Journeys and Service Blueprints
- Design Sprint
Interaction Design
Defining specific user interaction is the next challenge in the iterative design process. We tend to take our initial whiteboard sketches of user flows and transfer them into UI layout using elements and patterns such as buttons, toggles or list views matching these specific requirements.
However, this will not always fly with the out-of-the-box platform behavior. We might be entering a very painful route of customization, often more complex than a greenfield implementation.
Out of the Box
The power and impact of Now platform come from out-of-the-box capabilities. At the same time, this is a trap for structured UX design process.
My biggest warning and concern goes to the Backstage user interface. There is no secret that the overall UI just mimics database records. When the design process is heavily influenced by technological functions and the delivery pressure, some of these patterns are not challenged but propagated across the service stages directly to service fulfillers and portal app user interfaces.
Just the existence of a default UI element does not guarantee, that using it in a specific workflow would be successful for your users and your company organizational model. When the existence of a component or pattern is used as a reason to include the feature in your product, always refer to ethnographic user research or aim for quick usability testing targeting your audiences — both service and backstage users.
