Platform Academy: UI Builder Ask the Experts: Your Top Questions, Answered

[Sharon_Barnes]

If you've ever wished you could sit down with the UI Builder product team and just ask everything that's been on your mind, this is your recap. In a recent Ask the Experts session, Maria Gabriela Waechter— outbound product manager for UI Builder — fielded questions live from the community. Below is a curated summary of the best questions and answers from that session.

Whether you're brand new to UI Builder or a seasoned developer trying to keep up with what changed in Zurich, there's something here for you.

First things first: What even is the Next Experience UI Framework?

You might have heard it called Seismic, UXF, the Now Experience UI Framework, or Polaris — these all refer to the same thing: ServiceNow's modern UI layer for workspaces and agent experiences. It's React-like (but not React), and it provides a standardized, consistent experience across the platform. Polaris is the new theme that shipped with San Diego.

The short version: when you're building in UI Builder, this is the tech stack underneath everything.

UI Builder vs. Service Portal: There is no relationship

This one comes up a lot. Service Portal is built on Angular 1 — it's a completely different tech stack from UI Builder. They don't share components, they don't interoperate, and they're designed for different use cases:

• Service Portal (Angular 1): Best for customer-facing, public-accessible portals. Employee Service Center runs on this stack.
• UI Builder (Next Experience): Best for agent/fulfiller workspaces and authenticated internal experiences.

If you're looking for a detailed breakdown, search for the article by Brad Tilton — it covers this comparison thoroughly and is a great resource to bookmark.

One important caveat: making a UI Builder experience publicly accessible is significantly harder than Service Portal. Our out-of-the-box data resources require authentication, so you'd need to build custom data resources for everything on public pages. For authenticated customer portals, UI Builder can work. For truly public-facing portals, Service Portal is still the recommendation.

Are we deprecating Core UI / UI-16 forms and lists?

Not anytime soon. Core UI is still supported. That said, you will notice that new features — especially AI-related capabilities — are being built primarily for workspaces. If you're on the older "mint green" Agent Workspace, it's worth upgrading to a configurable workspace, which adopts your instance theme and is the current recommended path.

Workspaces: Where do I even start?

The best advice: read the documentation for the specific workspace you're implementing. Every workspace has its own configuration approach, and the docs will tell you exactly how each one is meant to be set up.

For creating something new, you have two options:

• Workspace Builder: A simplified wizard that generates a starting workspace, which you then open in UI Builder to customize. Useful if you want a template to start from.
• UI Builder directly: More flexible, but a bit more involved. There's a full tutorial on the ServiceNow Community on how to build a workspace from scratch.

The recommended approach is to start with the out-of-the-box ServiceNow workspace that maps to your use case, duplicate the variant if you want to make changes to the OOB pages, and make changes from there — rather than building from scratch unless you have a custom solution that really requires it.

How do workspace updates and variants actually work?

This is one of the trickier aspects of working with workspaces, so let's break it down:

• Each page in a workspace has variants. The out-of-the-box variant is what ServiceNow updates.
• When you want to customize a page, duplicate the OOB variant and make your changes in the copy.
• When ServiceNow ships an update, it goes to the OOB variant only — your custom variant won't automatically receive it.
• To incorporate an update, you'll need to compare your variant to the updated OOB one and manually re-apply relevant changes — or re-duplicate the OOB variant if the changes are significant.

There's currently no built-in merge tool, though you can use the "Compare versions" option (available from the hamburger menu on the top left of the UI Builder page view) to review the history of changes to your variant.

One Zurich-era tool that helps here: the conversational AI assistant inside UI Builder. You can ask it questions like "what does this client state parameter do?" or "how is this page configured?" and it'll explain what it finds. It’s very useful for getting oriented when you're new to a variant.

Custom components: CLI vs. UI Builder component building

As of Zurich, there are two ways to build custom components:

CLI Component Development (Pro Code)

This is the original approach — write JavaScript outside the platform, configure JSON metadata, and use the SNC CLI to compile and deploy to your instance. The big advantage is maximum power: you can import any NPM library you want. Daniel demonstrated this live by building a custom 3D model viewer component using the Three.js library, loaded via NPM.

The tradeoff: it's a full pro-code experience with a build/deploy cycle. If you're coming from a traditional dev background, that's familiar territory. If not, it has a steep learning curve. Resources to get started:

• The Knowledge 23 Photo Booth Lab on GitHub
• The ServiceNow Developer site (Reference > CLI)
• Daniel's 3D component repo on GitHub (link shared in the session)

UI Builder Component Building (Low/No Code)

New in Zurich — and this is a big one — you can now build reusable components directly inside UI Builder without touching the CLI. Think of it as the same UI Builder experience you already know, but with a properties panel that lets you define configurable inputs for your component.

Before this existed, the only way to reuse configuration was page collections (a page nested inside a page). UI Builder component building opens up much more flexibility, especially for low-code developers who want reusable building blocks across workspaces.

To access it: go to the UI Builder homepage, click Components, and hit Create.

Can low-code developers use UI Builder?

Yes — but you'll want to invest some time in the training first. UI Builder is designed to give developers maximum flexibility, which means there's a learning curve. A few things that help:

• Take the free Fundamentals and Advanced courses on ServiceNow University (free as of Yokohama/Zurich).
• Watch Chris Johnson's UI Builder 101 video — it's comprehensive and well-regarded in the community.
• Expect to interact with JSON config fairly often. It's not required to write code, but reading and understanding JSON will make your life easier.
• If you want to work with interactivity, having some familiarity with event-based/state-based models (even conceptually) will help.

Maria's advice: set your mind to it and go through the documentation and training systematically. She's written a learning guide on the Community with a recommended order of operations — check it out if you're not sure where to start.

Other quick-hit questions

UI Builder is now on the store

If you're missing features in your current UI Builder instance, check the Plugin Manager in the store for available updates. One heads up: don't trust the "last sync date" shown there — always hit Sync Now to get the most current state.

ATF (Automated Test Framework) support

ATF support for Next Experience is being added, but it's on a per-component basis. Check the component-specific documentation and release notes for each version to track what's supported.

Next Experience Developer Tools Chrome extension

ServiceNow's official developer tooling for Next Experience is a Chrome extension — "Next Experience Developer Tools." Currently only officially supported in Google Chrome (though Chromium-based browsers may work). Search for it in the Chrome Web Store.

VS Code / external IDE support

For CLI component development, yes — you're writing in VS Code (or any editor) and deploying via the CLI. For general UI Builder configuration, no — there's no external IDE integration for that workflow at this time.

Dashboards: UI Builder vs. Platform Analytics workspace

Building a dashboard in UI Builder gives you more customization control over component properties than the Platform Analytics workspace. For performance comparison questions specifically, check with the Platform Analytics Academy team — they'll have a more informed answer.

A big thanks to Maria Gabriela Waechter for hosting and to Daniel for jumping in with the live CLI component demo. If you have specific implementation questions or support issues, the Community is the best place to start — and if you have feedback on the UI Builder Advanced course on ServiceNow University, Maria would love to hear it.

Want to catch future sessions? Keep an eye on the Platform Academy schedule for upcoming topics including document intelligence, AI-driven onboarding, and more.