Welcome to a new series on the UX SIG where I plan to highlight the new features and enhancements, we are excited about in each family release. Our plan is to specifically focus on the changes that allow you to configure and customize great user experiences. We don’t plan to highlight every user interface improvement made in the release but want to identify areas where there are new and improved opportunities for you as an administrator or creator.
One of the main themes of this family release is generative AI. With Now Assist, the Now Platform delivers game-changing artificial intelligence capabilities which can be leveraged across our IT, Customer Service, HR, and Creator Workflows. Read more about Now Assist on our website.
We’d love to hear what you are excited about with the Vancouver Release. Leave us a comment with the features and enhancements that you look forward to leveraging when you upgrade to Vancouver.
Other Vancouver Release Resources
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other great Vancouver Release content from my colleagues:
- Lauren McManamon’s multi-week series on the Vancouver Release
- Great resources from the Developer Advocates on Community
Table of Contents
Configurable Workspace
The Configurable Workspaces are used by our product teams and customers to create consoles for service desk employees, agents, and other fulfiller personas. With each release, our product teams respond to customer feedback to make the experience more efficient and intuitive, supporting your workers’ ability to help requestors by resolving issues fast. With Vancouver, we bring back some features you might have been used to from the Classic Environment and add more configurability to the experiences you deliver.
Inline list editing
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=lists-inline-edit.html&version=latest
This is a feature many users loved in the Classic Environment and missed when Configurable Workspaces were first introduced. In the Utah family release, ServiceNow added the ability to do inline editing, but it required your administrator to enable this setting. Now, with the Vancouver release, it is enabled by default. All your workspace lists automatically get this valuable capability when you upgrade to Vancouver.
Conditionally enable Declarative actions
When your users are interacting with list views in a workspace, they may need to act on one or more items in the list. The actions available should be dependent on the details of the records in the selected row. For example, you can only "Delete Draft" if a record is in “state=Draft.”
With the Vancouver release you can use Condition Builder or scripts to set up conditions that determine if an action is available.
Highlighted field in a Configurable Workspace
Sometimes you want to draw your agents' attention to a specific form element in your workspace. Maybe the case they are handling is for a VIP and you want to make sure they are aware. In this release you can add conditional highlighted labels to your form fields.
Guided Tours in Configurable Workspaces
Generally, a good user experience should be designed in a way that is intuitive for even the most novice of users. With that said, Configurable Workspaces are created for service desk users who need to gain proficiency quickly and need to learn both the processes and the system during a fast-onboarding process. To help your users quickly orient themselves to a new workspace, we've expanded the Guided Tour functionality to support Configurable Workspaces. Now you can script step-by-step guidance for the workspaces you implement for your users.
Since this is the UX SIG, I must add this:
Don't let the Guided Tours be a crutch for a bad experience. Fix the problems, don't train it away. The Guided Tour serves to orient the user at a time when they are inundated with information. It isn't something they will access every time they use the application.
UI actions on attachments
This is one I could have used on several projects a few years ago. We needed to allow users to interact with record attachments within the Now Platform and at the time had to create a custom contextual side panel to solve our use case. Now, with the ability to define UI actions for the attachments panel, you can allow your users to perform specific actions related to the attachment.
Our use case was to open an embedded PDF viewer in "review" mode so a user could mark up the document. This functionality would have allowed us to achieve our goal with a simple script on the new action, instead of having to build an entirely new panel.
Auto reflow
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=auto-reflow.html&version=latest
For your users with low vision, their browser's zoom capability is one critical tool to improve their ability to read content. Prior to this release, Configurable Workspaces did not handle zoom well; content would overlap and become illegible.
With improvements to the layout framework and components, users zooming in to between 200%-400% will experience much better experiences without any loss of information or functionality.
This improvement affects some product-specific workspaces as well as any workspaces you build using UI Builder.
Service Portal
Service Portal is foundational to most of your users’ interactions with ServiceNow. It underpins Employee Center and other product-specific requestor experiences. In this release, we saw an improvement which simplifies a common task - adding an attachment.
Drag & drop attachments
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=attaching-files-portal-pages.html&version=latest
This one is personally exciting as uploading attachments was one of my biggest challenges with the platform. Now, within Service Portals (including Employee Center), the platform supports drag and drop of attachments, as well as copy and pasting attachments. This improvement includes updating some existing base system widgets that accept attachments to support drag and drop and enables you to add this capability to any custom widgets you build. There is a new directive, “sp-attachment-button” that allows you to use this in your own widgets.
UI Builder
When you are creating your own Configurable Workspaces or enhancing a product-specific workspace, UI Builder is the tool critical to laying out your experience and adding interface capabilities. With Vancouver, we saw improvements to layout experience, new and improved components, and a great example of how one of our BUs created some persona-specific experiences with contextual side panels.
Simplified Container Layouts
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=column-layout.html&version=latest
For those creating pages with UI Builder, one frustration we heard from users was around setting up the column layouts for pages. With the latest release, UI Builder now allows you to select from a set of predefined layouts with 1-6 columns with different column width configurations. Once a layout is selected, the container is added to your and you can modify the column widths or start adding components.
Component – now-date-time & now-date-time-interval
Like the drag-and-drop attachment improvement, this one is a long time coming as well as it addresses a pet peeve I have when putting in date-based inputs. The new date-time and date-time-interval components add clearer affordances for navigating the calendar, especially when needing to go back several years or months. These more intuitive components should reduce the time to enter date-based information and improve the accuracy of information collected.
You can use these new components in any new UI Builder-based experiences and existing experiences will automatically benefit from these improvements.
Component now-dropdown-items with images
This is a nice improvement to the dropdown component as it offers the option to add an image next to each drop-down item. This additional layer of context can enhance your users' ability to decide between items.
I already see the benefit in UI Builder's use of this component when selecting from the built in theme hooks for margin and padding.
I'd love to see the creative ways you add images to reduce the mental load for your users when selecting from a drop-down list.
Field Service Management - contextual side panel for tasks and agents
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=dispatch-map-in-dispatcher-workspace.html&version=latest
This improvement to Dispatcher Workspace is a great example of how a team can leverage the Next Experience UI Framework to add capabilities to an existing workspace. I share this not to highlight the capability itself, but as an example of how you should think about tailoring experiences to your business process's needs.
Dispatcher Workspace is the main working space for dispatchers, bringing speed and efficiency to field service scheduling. It provides dispatchers and managers with a complete view of tasks, teams, locations, and status. With the Vancouver release, the product team wanted to reduce the effort dispatchers needed to manage utilization and performance. By adding two new contextual side panels, they enhanced the workspace and maximized their use of real estate.
Contextual side panels are a great way to optimize screen real estate for content that may provide additional actions or context to an experience. Consider this when designing your own workspace experience.
Mobile
Our two apps, Now Mobile and Mobile Agent, extend the ServiceNow experience into the hands of your mobile workforce. They provide the ability to create tailored experiences for specific jobs-to-be-done when users are away from their desks. In Vancouver, we add a much-requested visual improvement with dark mode support and expose a powerful feature to help transform business processes.
Dark Theme Support in Now Mobile and Mobile Agent
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=dark-theme-mobile.html&version=latest
For your mobile app users that prefer dark mode in the ServiceNow apps, this setting is now just a few clicks away. This is a per-user setting, so everyone can decide to enable dark mode (or another theme variant) by going into their Settings->Preferences and changing their Theme to "dark" or other options you may provide.
This works for both Now Mobile and Mobile Agent apps.
Mobile App Bridge - Playbooks
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=configure-mobile-playbooks.html&version=latest
In my previous role here at ServiceNow, I helped a lot of customers explore transforming a business process using the platform. Often, we'd explore a structured set of activities and think about how to guide workers through those activities. When Playbooks first launched as a feature, they provided a critical capability to help users properly complete a process workflow.
There were a few use cases we explored where providing users with the same process on mobile would have changed the game. For example, when we were working with mobile workforces who might be inspecting a fishing boat for catch violations or working with executive travelers out of an aircraft hangar.
The ability to use Mobile App Bridge and place Playbooks into the Mobile Agent will improve your mobile workforce’s ability to effectively service their customers.
If you are not already using Playbooks for your case workers, you should explore how this capability can provide structure to processes.
Various Platform Improvements
Each release adds more capabilities to help you create tailored and intuitive experiences across the platform. With this release, we see better support for internationalization and smarter capabilities for Virtual Agent.
Multilingual content filter
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=international-language-support-ais.html&version=latest
I hadn't even thought about this use case until reading about this feature and now it makes sense. If your AI Search is configured to search a specific language based on the user's country, you can now expand that search to include multiple languages. I can see this making sense for countries where there are multiple common languages (e.g., Switzerland) or where your employees in a country speak multiple languages.
Virtual Agent DialogActs
https://docs.servicenow.com/csh?topicname=c_dialog-acts.html&version=latest
The DialogActs feature expands the natural language abilities in Virtual Agent to allow for more fluid conversations. Instead of a user clicking on “Yes/No” answers, they use their natural language to affirm or negate a request. Even more interesting, they can modify a previous answer using natural language inputs.
Watching this one in action was cool. In the demo I saw, the user answered questions about an upcoming trip including their destination, including hotel needs and more. After responding with their desired destination and then answering a question about their departure date, they realized they picked the wrong destination. Instead of answering "what is your departure date?", they typed, "oops, I am going to Madrid, not Paris"... DialogActs correctly interpreted this and updated their destination.
With the “modify” type of DialogAct, the topic administrator can specify whether the change requires user confirmation or is processed automatically.
What are you excited about?
Don’t forget to leave your favorite things about the Vancouver release in the comments below.
