ServiceNow's Quebec family release is just around the corner and is one of the largest (I think) family releases we’ve had. It contains some really jaw-dropping features that will have any inner-nerd dancing for joy to get started with exploring what they can do.
The new UI for Flow Designer (FD) has been modernised to fit with the new platform styling of Now Experience. Don’t be fooled by the cleaned up and slim downed interface, it still contains the much loved functionality to practically replace scripting in the platform and shows the move to enabling a low-code/no-code citizen development approach to maintaining your ServiceNow instance.
Help & Support
Upon creating or opening a FD component, users will be presented with the below guided tour prompt to aid a quick adoption and shorten the learning curve of how the workflow tool works. Further to this, users can check out Now Learning or follow these steps to building their first flow.
Further help can be accessed directly within FD through the help panel. In the Flow Designer landing page's main header, select the question mark icon to open the help panel.
Action Picker
To fit with the designer and characteristics of dot walking fields within flow designer, the action picker has been condensed (maybe too much?) to provide a simpler view. Additional features include:
- Recently accessed actions are now collated under their own header
- Popular actions across the platform, based on all users, is also available in its own header
- Action descriptions now appear in a contextual popover.
My personal preference would be for these columns to be widened ever so slightly to fit more than 20-24 characters.
Flow Logic
The flow logic operators have also had a bit of a face lift and aid in providing a bit more context on how a flow is structured. Previously I found the branching a tad confusing on whether the branch was the truthy or falsy result of the statement and many of business users thought the same. The simple addition of then provides that needed UI/UX touch that makes it feel like the beautiful ServiceNow employees that have created Flow Designer are gently cradling us in their arms.
Interested to learn more? Check out the Quebec Flow Designer Release Notes
