At this year’s Knowledge event in Vegas, George Hinchliffe and I were able to host a session about building better workspace experiences. Creating a great workspace is a lot like baking a cake: it can feel overwhelming without a recipe, and it’s important to know who you’re baking for before you start. What cake flavors do these people enjoy? What’s the occasion? Is anyone allergic to anything? All these factors influence the recipe you pick, the ingredients you include, and what decorations you use on top.
If you’re interested in learning about our recipe for a better workspace, keep reading to learn more about what we covered in our session and to try it out for yourself.
What is a workspace?
ServiceNow recognizes the need for UI layouts and configurations tailored for specific users. The workspace was created to provide flexible and targeted solutions to make our different user personas more efficient and productive.
The Configurable Workspace is designed to supercharge productivity for fulfiller personas, like customer service, IT, and case agents. A few of the benefits of a configurable workspace include:
- A fully configurable UI to meet any layout needs
- A multi-record experience that enables you to include helpful data and context from other records to help users get work done more quickly
- Customizable navigation with the option to add tabs for simplified multi-tasking
- Embedded AI
Our recipe for a better workspace experience
In our workshop, we started every attendee out with same prompt:
Create a Workspace for a front-office agent working in a high-volume contact center.
We want to ensure we build a workspace that will make this person as productive as possible. How can we do that? We follow the recipe, of course!
- Understand your user goals, needs, and KPIs (key performance indicators): What is this person doing? What actions do they need to be able to complete? What info do they need? How is their performance measured by their leadership? What is slowing them down?
- Use that information to identify your design objectives: What are we trying to accomplish with this workspace? Are we aiming to maximize efficiency? Or enable them to provide as much detail as possible in their notes? Our solution will look different depending on our answer to this question.
- Prototype your solution: Use the Horizon Figma component libraries to quickly create a wireframe of your workspace.
- Test your prototype with users: This can be as simple as putting your wireframe in front of a user and asking a few simple questions, like:
- How would you get started on this case?
- What are some things that stand out?
- How would you better understand the customer issue?
- Where would you go to find a solution?
- What, if any, information would you like to include or exclude?
- Iterate: Based on what happens in your testing, you might want to add, remove, or change some things.
Check out the attached slides for even more info about this exercise. And if you try it out for yourself, let me know in the comments.
