Family Updates: How the Xanadu Release helps you transform your UX. Now with AI.

[AJ Siegel]

Earlier this month, ServiceNow announced the Now Platform® Xanadu release, focused on providing actionable AI across the enterprise. With this release, we make progress on our AI roadmap to help organizations be more productive, personalized, and valuable.

There's plenty to say about the new AI capabilities in Xanadu, and many of my colleagues have written great pieces about AI. Here in the UX SIG, we want to focus on platform and product capabilities and improvements released. Below, we explore 10 ways in which Xanadu will help you implement, create, and improveexperiences for the benefit of your users.

Next Experience Improvements

Contextual Sidebar component improvements

After hearing plenty of feedback on the difficulty of working with this component in UI Builder, the latest updates make it easier to configure your sidebar by adding new tabs or changing the existing ones to fit your needs.

Screenshot of the Component Selector within UI Builder. A grid of icons with text underneath. One icon is called Contextual Sidebar and there is a black arrow pointing at it. The Tabs section of the configuration panel for the Contextual Side Panel. Show 4 rectangles with the word Tab and then a description of the content in the tab for each one.

The contextual sidebar is a great way to provide additional context and functionality to fulfillers working on a record. Now that it is easier to work with, consider how the sidebar might enhance your agent's experience in a workspace.

Tagging in Activity Stream

Do your agents struggle to find important notes in long activity streams? Now you can help them filter activities in the activity stream with predefined tags. Take a look at the new tagging ability to assign predefined tags to a workspace's activity stream. Tags can come from static or dynamic states not offered with existing filters and only show up for specific tables.

Once tags are defined, your users can select a specific item's tag icon and add one of the tags.

A list of activity steam items with a dropdown menu called Tags expanded. In the menu is a series of items with checked checkboxes next to each of them. The user can click select all or clear all.

Themeable empty-state images

There are times where you end users will find themselves on a landing page with a list or standalone page and there's no data. There are empty-state images and calls to action that fill the void and help them make decisions on next actions. With the Xanadu release, you can now theme these images and replace the image as well. This can improve the expression of your company's brand in the experience.

Native Mobile

UX improvements to Mobile App Studio

A series of improvements were made to make building Native Mobile experiences easier for creators. Creators can easily manage list screens with Simplified List Screen and configure cards with a better integration with Mobile Card Builder. If your instance is using AI Search, the platform can now recommend components to use on screens based on contextual information like the record name and configuration information. With Xanadu, we expanded the duplicate function to include launcher screens, functions, and card templates. All these enhancements combine to make it easier to deliver better experiences in the palm of your user's hands.

The heading Recommendations with a series of AI generated ideas to add to your screen. Each idea has text, a preview button, and a select button.

 

Indoor Mapping expansion

Before Washington DC, Indoor Mapping was available for the Workplace Service Delivery (WSD) product in the ServiceNow Mobile app. The business knew it was useful beyond WSD. With the Washington DC release, they added mapping to work orders tasks in Field Service Management and IT Asset Management. In the spirit of continuous improvements, the Xanadu release added more capabilities. These improvements will make it easier to find items on the map. Now "affected products" show up on the map, ensuring the agent can see all the stops they need to make to resolve the work order.

Three mobile screens from the Asset Management application. Showing a list of assets, asset descriptions, and then an indoor map of where the asset is.

Sidebar for Mobile

Using Sidebar, agents can have real-time collaboration with others based around a Workspace record. These Sidebar discussions facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge to help resolve issues faster and with higher-quality outcomes. Before Xanadu, this feature was only available in a Workspace. This made it hard for people in the field to work together. Now, Sidebar is available for the Mobile Agent app, making it easier for your teams to collaborate whether desk-bound or out in the field.

Three screens from the mobile app,. The first shows a list of conversations with the title, participants, and most recent message. The second shows a conversation. The third, details about the conversation including subject and participants

 

Autofill input fields

Often, you might have a situation where input fields can be auto-filled based on a user's answer to other fields in the form. Historically, this ability was supported via client scripts in Core UI and Workspaces, but unavailable in Native Mobile apps. With the latest updates, client scripts can be applied to mobile input forms as well. These scripts are added to the Mobile UI Rules table and can fulfill common autofill use cases such as:

• Updating Location and Cost Center when Assigned To is changed on an asset record
• Show an employee's title when updating the employee name on an HR form

Employee Center

Guided self–service

The need for this capability came up in lots of my customer engagements in the Workflow Design Studio. Many of my engagements focused on helping users enter information into complex, multistep forms. Thankfully, some of my developer and architect colleagues figured out some work-arounds to support this in the Service Portal app framework. Now, with Guided Self-Service, customers can use Playbooks to increase the streamline information entry for complex request scenarios. I am excited to try this one out!

An animation showing a user answering a series of multiple choice questions before getting to the catalog item form.

Additional Platform Opportunities

Catalogs for Virtual Agents

With this update, users will be able to complete catalog item forms in conversation, instead of clicking away to the catalog page. In addition, this improvement also enables agents to push a catalog item to a user through a simple slash command. This capability makes it that much simpler for users to self-serve via Virtual Agent.

Now Assist Skills Kit

Interested in adding generative AI skills from Now Assist to your app but not sure how to start? The Skills Kit makes it easy to customize and build use case specific skills for your unique business processes. Through a simple 4-step process, you can define your LLM, define the inputs and prompts, test the prompt on real data, and then reveal the skill in Core UI forms and lists or Workspace pages.