Introduction
If your organization is planning a migration to ServiceNow’s Employee Center/ Employee Center Pro, follow these steps to ensure a successful transition. The timeline of your migration depends on several factors, including level of intended customizations, content availability and quality, stakeholder alignment and integration considerations.
In practice, these steps are not entirely sequential. Treat these as iterative steps and revisit them as you receive feedback from users on the overall portal experience. Note: (* indicates PRO feature). Don't feel like reading? Watch a webinar instead!
Step 1: Understand EC or EC Pro Capabilities:
Begin by comprehensively understanding the capabilities and features of the Employee Center
Goals for Step 1:
- Understand Employee Center’s product vision and goals
- Deep dive into Employee Center’s features and capabilities
- Compare the out-of-box (OOB) experience with the current state
It’s important for product stakeholders to grasp the core functionality of Employee Center before building out requirements. Understanding the underlying technology will allow teams to make informed decisions and learn what OOB features can solve for your users needs. Remember, Employee Center portal extends the Service Portal platform, so much of the underlying technology is the same. This should make the migration less daunting for customers with existing Service Portals in the same instance.
Before you get started, remember to:
- Build a team: Identify and engage core stakeholders from the beginning
- Create a vision and define goals: Invest time in building a common understanding of the portal vision and goals
- Define success: Define business value metrics associated with your organizational goals
- Stay knowledgable on product features: Stay up to speed with the product roadmap
- Understand and educate: Use this Employee Center Hype Video as part of your own internal adoption campaign and for understanding the platform capabilities.
Use these resources to learn more about Employee Center capabilities:
- Employee Center Hype Video (3 min)
- Employee Center Product Hub: Features and Capabilities
- Employee Center Academy Sessions
- Employee Center Academy: Migrating to Employee Center (Pro)*
- Employee Center Roadmap Webinars
- Now Create: Employee Center Success Map
- Now Create: Employe Center Process Guide
- Now Learning: Employee Center Essentials
- Now Create: Employee Center – Process Workshop Presentation
- ServiceNow Total & Advanced Impact Customers can take advantage of the following accelerator(s): Jumpstart your Employee Center
STEP 2: Design the Experience:
Develop a user-centered design for the Employee Center, considering human-centered design experiences and defining design principles.
Goals for Step 2:
- Establish a shared understanding of what UX is and its implications for your project
- Get to know your users and their experiences
- Explore what the new experience can be
- Define your design principles and design process
It is strongly recommended to engage user experience experts who also understand the ServiceNow platform capabilities when designing your experience. Ask your ServiceNow account team about how you can engage expert ServiceNow partners (UX+ platform knowledge) or ServiceNow expert services resources for this step of your initiative. This step should go alongside the "requirements gathering" phase of your software development lifecycle. Teams that make the mistake of skipping or deprioritizing this step might run into issues with user experience or adoption down the road.
Strike the balance between user needs and customization-heavy designs:
User-centered design is important, but maintaining a product with minimal technical debt and high performance is also important.
- Designers should prioritize the needs of users through human-centered design practices, but it's important to validate designs/mockups with technical resources and portal experts to ensure no/low-customization and low-risk designs. Maximize OOB functionality before suggesting custom solutions.
- On the other hand, technical resources and other stakeholders should empower designers to produce designs to avoid group-think or "design by committee" situations. There may be legitimate justification for customizations in some cases. Some customizations are low-risk when best practices are followed.
- For example, many designs can be accomplished with CSS/styling overrides (low-risk) when best CSS practices are utilized. However, severely modifying core OOB functionality/ widgets is rarely recommended. When in doubt, ask. There may be a configuration option that will suffice.
Once initial, low-fidelity mockups are complete, designers should work closely with product experts to validate the designs.
Stakeholders, designers and development teams are encouraged to learn what constitutes a good portal experience.
Recommended plan for designing your experience:
| Step 1: Define User Experience Goals | Step 2: Design the User Experience | Step 3: Refine the User Experience | Step 4: Enhance User Experience |
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Tips for designing your experience:
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When in doubt, stick to using OOB configurations – configure the OOB with demo data to evaluate it in a PDI
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Only include high-value, low-impact customizations
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Work with a ServiceNow partner who is experienced in designing portals
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Invest in building in-house expertise in conducting user research studies
Use these research resources when designing your experience:
- Now Learning: User Experience for ServiceNow
- Now Create: Employee Center – Process Workshop Presentation
- Employee Center Academy: Design techniques to kick start deployment
- Employee Center Figma library
- Steps to deploy Employee Center with Demo Data
- ServiceNow Total & Advanced Impact Customers can take advantage of the following accelerators: UX: Design for Employee Center
Check out examples of Employee Center portals from the ServiceNow 2024 Best Employee Portal Contest (BEPC) .
Step 3: Define the Information Architecture:
Establish a clear information architecture / taxonomy that aligns with the Employee Center's design and enhances the user experience. This process may involve card sorting or tree testing exercises to validate your structure.
Goals for Step 3:
- Build an Employee-Centric Information Architecture (IA)
- Define your Content Taxonomy topics & owners
- Map existing content to Taxonomy
What is Employee Center's Unified taxonomy? A collection of hierarchical topics that brings together different content types – requests, articles, quick links, employee communications – across departments into a single employee-centric taxonomy. If you are unfamiliar with taxonomy, it's recommended you learn more about unified taxonomy before proceeding.
Defining your information architecture, or unified taxonomy, is a crucial step when planning your portal. Your information architecture represents the front-end navigation (for your end users) on your portal. Note: This front-end, unified taxonomy, is not to be confused with the categorization you might use in the back-end for maintenance, etc. These are two separate things and can be treated as such.
Organizations with an existing, well-defined information architecture/content categorization may be able to reuse some or all of their categories if they make sense in your new portal. Otherwise, use ServiceNow's pre-defined out-of-the-box taxonomy models and add, remove or modify the categories until all of your content topics are accounted for.
It is recommended to follow this decision tree to determine which approach you will take to design IA:
Tips for defining an information architecture:
- Assign topic owners to maintain the topic content.
- Use *Rich Content to make your topic pages act as *Microsites
- Don’t replicate your catalog or knowledge categories as taxonomy topics
- Minimize the number of topics – Set an upper limit of no more than 4 levels and 10 topics per level.
- Use Advanced Portal Navigation to:
- Consolidating taxonomy topics under one menu and intermixing other relevant pages/links
- Right align topics that need emphasis
Use these resources when building a taxonomy:
- Employee Center Academy – Curated Experiences
- Now Create: Employee Center – Unified Taxonomy Workbook
- Employee Center Academy – Mega Menu Configurations
- Community article – Mega Menu Configurations
- ServiceNow's Employee Center: Out-of-the-box Taxonomy Models
Note: ServiceNow Total & Advanced Impact Customers can take advantage of the following accelerator(s):
- UX: Taxonomy Review & Design Accelerator
Step 4: Migrate Content
Decide on the criteria for content migration. Focus on migrating only quality content and utilize the opportunity to improve engagement through well-structured, non-duplicate content.
Goals for Step 4:
When migrating content from an external system or when transitioning content from Service Portal to Employee Center…
- Build a committee or a decision board for the migration
- Engage authors to assist in content migration and establish topic-level committees for decision-making on content relevance and alignment
- Identify the content to migrate (within ServiceNow and/or from external systems)
- Define the content type it would migrate as
- Define roles and ownership for topic pages and content publishing. This involves assigning ownership rights to contributors and ensuring governance
Tips for migrating content:
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Use Knowledge Articles for deep technical content.
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Create Topic Microsites (using Rich Content*) for services marketing or information content.
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Use News and Banner announcements for time-bound marketing content.
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Account for different design capabilities, for example:
- Is your current content full page width? Employee Center pages are not by default
- Does your content respond down to mobile size? Employee Center is designed to be responsive
Step 5: Deploy the Experience
Follow the steps to deploy the experience on the portal.
Goals for Step 5:
- Activate the latest Plugins
- Build the taxonomy structure & Mega Menu
- Configure the OOB widgets
- Build the portal theme & apply required CSS changes
- Build required customizations
- Setup integrations
- Activate Analytics
Recommended deployment path for Step 5 (* indicates PRO feature):
Note: This flow does not include the creation of content, such as Knowledge Articles and Catalog Items
- Install latest EC plugins from ServiceNow store
- Setup Portal Theme
- Go to Service Portal branding editor
- Make changes to the portal theme
- Change CSS variables for more granular controls
- Set up Information Architecture
- Build the taxonomy
- Clone OOB taxonomy “Employee”, make changes, and associate new taxonomy with EC portal
- Add content to the taxonomy topics
- Add the required Menu Items
- Configure Advanced Portal Navigation
- Make required widget configurations
- Employee Center header, footer
- My active tasks
- Quick links
- Manager Hub*
- ..etc.
- Setup Employee Profile
- Opt-in for Employee Profile
- Create Employee Profiles
- Make required configurations for Profile page
- Setup App Launcher*
- Configure the SSO integration
- Add non-SSO applications
- Setup Integrations*
- SharePoint Connecter
- Approvals Hub
- HCM integrations
- …etc.
- Assign ownership and content contributor
- Topic Page ownership
- Content Publishing Ownership*
- Activate Analytics
- User Experience Analytics
- Content Publishing analytics*
- Setup page route maps to redirect legacy custom Service Portal pages to appropriate pages on Employee Center.
Tips for deploying the experience
- Remember, the out-of-box experience is already a great user experience, as ServiceNow product teams invest greatly in UX research driven design
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Use CSS Overrides as a first line of "customization" to reduce tech debt and skip records
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If you must customize, edit the OOTB widget to make comparing custom to OOTB easy with the version diff tool.
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Be sure to use translation method calls and not hardcode strings for multilingual support
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When in production, create your content, communications, and content mapping
Visual representation of this flow:
Use these resources when deploying your experience:
- Monthly Event: Employee Center Deployment Office Hours
- Check out this community post on service portal CSS to learn more about overriding CSS styles in ServiceNow.
A note for development teams:
- Use these Employee Center development starter stories as foundational user stories to get started.
- Refer to the "Migrate to Employee Center from Service Portal" documentation for deeper assistance.
Step 6: Test the Experience
Validate your design and the overall experience by testing in sub-prod environments, find improvements and look for defects prior to go-live.
Goals for Step 6:
- Conduct QA testing
- Conduct Usability Testing
- Conduct Performance Testing
| Functionality (for QA) Testing | Usability Testing | Performance Testing |
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Tips for testing the experience:
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Capture good Testing Steps as part of your stories – Your QA is as good as your test scripts
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Consider using web tests, such as Selenium (Note: They create data in the instance)
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Identify pilot users and capture feedback through them
- Avoid directing all users to home page during special company events – use event *microsites instead
Step 7: Plan for Launch & Adoption
Develop a comprehensive launch and adoption plan, including exec sponsorship and user engagement strategies such as guided tours and communication campaigns.
Goals for Step 7:
- Build your launch strategy
- Minimize change for users
- Invest in Organizational Change Management practices
Tips for launch and adoption:
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Consider soft-launching this is a separate portal and you can deploy alongside your existing portal - embrace "feature toggle" concept or "Beta" release
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User Research can help trigger scarcity persuasion as well as instill a sense of ownership
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Use your biggest feedback critics as research participants to help turn them into advocates and engage rather than avoid
Use these resources to learn more about planning for adoption:
- Employee Center Academy: Organizational Change Management to drive adoption
- ServiceNow Total & Advanced Impact Customers can take advantage of the following accelerator(s): Adoption Accelerator
Ensure Success Post-Migration
Develop a plan for continued maintenance and governance of the portal to maintain a positive experience for your end users.
Goals for Post-Migration
- Identify and empower an owner of the portal experience: The owner leads the portal end-to-end and is responsible for driving overall governance.
- Set up clear guidance on experience and content creation design principles (templates etc. )
- Empower content creators and democratizing content creation
- Start simple and slowly build out groups who can edit in prod
- Consider a mentor who can help others learn and help impart standards
Recommended Governance Strategy:
Three levels of governance is needed.
- Define Portal Governance
- Track value realized through portal
- Evolve portal vision and scope to maximize enterprise value
- Who is involved: Senior leadership and executive sponsors
- Define Technical Governance Plan
- Manage the new features and enhancements roadmap
- Validate and evolve experience design
- Who is involved: Business stakeholders, e.g. head of department
- Define Content Governance Plan
- Create process for maintaining content
- Identify and close content gaps
- Who is involved: Content authors, managers, and owners
Use these resources to learn more about governance:
- Employee Center Academy: Portal Governance
- Community Article: Content Governance
- 4 Key Employee Center Deployment tips (by a global pharmaceutical organization)
Continuously Improve
Leverage feedback, user experience analytics, and performance analytics dashboards for ongoing improvement and governance post-launch.
Continuously iterate on your Employee Center design and user experience based on user feedback, expert reviews and evolving needs.
Use these resources to learn more about continuous improvement:
- Community Article: User Experience Analytics
- Community Article: Integrated Experience and Service feedback
- ServiceNow Total & Advanced Impact Customers can take advantage of the following accelerator(s):
- UX: Portal Experience Review Accelerator
- Design Review Accelerator
- UX: Catalog Request Experience Review Accelerator
- TuneUp your Employee Center Accelerator
Already live with Employee Center? Learn 5 ways you can improve the overall user experience.
