Have you been tasked with improving the user experience of your ServiceNow portal? If so, you're in the right place!
As you begin your portal improvement journey, it’s important to continuously prioritize the needs of your users throughout requirements gathering, planning, design, implementation, and subsequent iterations of your portal solution. By actively listening to your users and integrating feedback throughout your entire implementation process, you'll be on track to a great user experience!
When customers report a poor portal experience, it’s often because the solution was driven solely based on business requirements, overlooking user input. OR the portal was designed with users in mind, but failed to consider ServiceNow platform functionality capabilities, acquiring technical debt and overly-customized portals in the process. It's crucial to strike a balance between your business requirements, the needs of your users and the technical capabilities of the platform.
Remember, improving an experience takes time and effort. However, this article will provide you with some tips to help you get started!
User Pain Point #1: “I struggle to find the specific content I’m looking for when navigating the portal."
Goal: Ensure content is easily accessible and logically organized for all users.
One of the most important steps for an intuitive portal experience is creating a user-centric taxonomy (information architecture) to offer users an intuitive navigation experience. This is especially important for organizations combining multiple portal experiences, content across several departments, and serving several persona types.
Start by categorizing your content/ information
- Understand your end users: Engage users to understand their language and anticipated challenges- ask users to complete tasks to learn how they interact with the current solution (if applicable).
- Conduct user research with your end users when designing your taxonomy: Recruit volunteers (real end-users) to participate in a card-sort or tree-test to get feedback on how they think the content should be organized. Learn more about how to use UX research methods to inform the information architecture.
Not sure what research methods to use? View the graphic below and decide what path works best for your organization.
Follow leading practices
- Top-level navigation (parent level) should not exceed 5-7 items
- Move from generic to specific – the content grouping should become more specific as users drill down further into the hierarchy of information
- Find the balance between business and user perspectives - Include stakeholders in your user feedback sessions or at least share findings
Use clear naming
- Avoid acronyms and technical jargon. Review content to eliminate language that may be unclear to users unfamiliar with specific services or technical processes.
- Use plain, familiar language Prioritize clear, straightforward terminology so that the largest possible number of users easily understand your content
- Speak in the users’ language Through the ServiceNow Localization Framework, you can ensure your global user base can experience your content in their native language.
- Create distinct labels: Each category or topic should be clearly different from others it appears near. They do not exist on an island but in proximity to their peers. This requires that your naming needs to be distinct enough, so users do not struggle to decide.
Gather continuous feedback
- Engage end users in the content organization strategy by using user-research methods like card-sorting and tree-testing. These methods help understand how users expect content to be structured.
The end goal of this exercise is the output of user-centric hierarchical categories and the respective content (catalog items, knowledge articles) of those categories.
Example:
Platform Pro Tip: For customers who are well-versed in Employee Center, consider enabling and configuring Advanced Portal Navigation. This tool facilitates intuitive navigation design and configuration, enhancing information architecture and topic discovery.
User Pain Point #2: “Search results lack reliability and/or relevancy."
Goal: Help users find the information they need quickly and efficiently through search.
Configure AI Search
- AI Search is a Now Platform feature that is active by default on newer family releases. Configure AI Search for your portal to leverage machine-learning powered search results and other platform capabilities. If you need help configuring AI Search, check out this AI Search Implementation Guide!
Review and tune AI Search Configurations as needed
Many helpful AI search configurations are enabled by default and will simply work out-of-the-box. However, it’s important to tune AI Search over time. Explore some methods you can use to improve your search results:
- Create Synonym Dictionaries: Define unique company-specific terms or acronyms to improve search accuracy.
- Create Stop Word Dictionaries: Exclude irrelevant terms from search queries to enhance precision.
- Increase Relevancy: Utilize machine learning and result improvement rules to optimize search results based on user context and actions. Boost or promote specific search results based on user context or defined conditions.
- Tune with Acronyms: Add abbreviations or specific terms to synonym dictionaries for better search performance.
- General Tuning Tips: Develop domain-specific vocabulary, review article titles, and apply result rules to address query performance. Review the titles of documents that may have not been done properly
earlier. One of the reasons might be the use of the metadata column by Zing search. You may
be able to save time by focusing on the queries that are not performing as expected.
There are 2 main places to look for your Employee Center-related search configurations:
- Navigate to your Search Application [sys_search_context_config.list] and click into “ESC Portal Default Search Application:
- Navigate to your Search Profile [ais_search_profile.list] and click into your “ESC Portal Default Search Profile” to review default search profile configurations
For detailed instructions and recommendations on the AI Tuning features, reference page 42 of the AI Search Implementation guide!
Monitor and Analyze Search Analytics
- Regularly monitor search analytics in the AI Search Analytics Dashboard to understand user search patterns, popular queries, and areas where users struggle to find relevant information. Use this data to iteratively improve the search experience.
Collect User Feedback
- Use platform surveys to collect feedback from users on their satisfaction with self-service experiences. Never force users to complete surveys Avoid survey fatigue by ensuring surveys are optional and focused on enhancing user satisfaction.
User Pain Point #3: “I find the content on the portal overwhelming and unrelated to my role.”
Goal: Personalize content based on the user’s roles, location, department, and job type to enhance relevance and user satisfaction.
Establish, Create and Assign User Criteria
Before creating user criteria, thoroughly understand the business requirements and the specific access needs of different user groups.
Establish User Criteria:
- Group Users by Similar Access Needs: Create roles that reflect groups of users with similar access needs. Lever
- Use Dynamic Filters: Leverage dynamic filters such as user roles, department, location, manager, etc., which can automatically update as user data changes. This ensures that membership in groups remains current.
Create User Criteria
- Utilize User Criteria to customize content visibility, including catalog items, knowledge articles/blocks and more. Note that the system comes with several pre-defined groups out-of-the-box that you can browse and use before configuring your own!
Step 1: Navigate to User Criteria [user_criteria.list] to modify or create user criteria
Assign User Criteria:
Step 2: Once your user criteria is created, assign it to your knowledge articles or catalog item(s). This will affect who will see the content on the portal.
Watch this webinar to learn more about personalization features
Drive Content Visibility by User Profile:
- Activate the Employee Profile to enable machine learning (ML) based content recommendations. Over time, the system learns from user interactions (default period x=30 days) and promotes relevant content based on similarity models.
- Employee Profile AI and ML models will drive the recommendations of articles and catalog items for similar users*.
*IT Service Management (ITSM) customers can use User Profile data.
*HR Service Delivery (HRSD) customers can use HR Profile data to further refine targeting
- If you have questions around how content recommendations work and any licensing dependencies, check out this article.
Watch this webinar to learn more about the Employee Profile feature.
Use User Experience Analytics Dashboard for Insights:
- The User Experience Analytics Dashboard provides key insights into common trends, popular searches, and user journeys. Analyze search logs and user behavior to understand common search patterns, frequently searched terms, and areas where users may encounter difficulties. Use this data to continuously refine and improve search functionality.
Platform Tip:
- Enable enhanced User Profile Page and opt in to the employee profile to tap into AI and ML-driven relevancy models.
- Use the “Recommended for you” widget to drive personalized content to the portal interface
User Pain Point #4: “The experience feels inconsistent, disjointed or unintuitive.”
Goal: Provide users with a seamless, intuitive experience across all tools and access points to facilitate easy access to support.
Use Form Design Best Practices:
- Simplify: Utilize existing data integrations and business rules to minimize user information requests.
- Avoid Technical Jargon: Ensure form language is understandable to all users, including those less familiar with service terminology.
- Optimize Information Collection: Use appropriate input controls to gather information efficiently. Variable sets can standardize data collection across catalogs.
- Educate your platform team and learn more about form design best practices.
Iterative User Interface Design & Improvement:
Iterate! Iterate! Iterate! Improving overall user experience doesn’t always necessitate a complete portal redesign. Continuously gather user feedback to understand frustrations and preferences related to portal usage.
- Prioritize user feedback over organizational hierarchy in determining portal enhancements.
- Channel user feedback into backlog items for continuous improvement.
Continuously Identify and Resolve Pain Points
- Moderated usability studies can observe user interactions to pinpoint areas needing improvement.
- Need guidance on conducting usability studies? Comment below for resources and additional tips!
Onboard a UX Expert to your platform team!!
- Ready to invest in UX? Ask your ServiceNow account team about additional UX resources.
- Need more proof? Take ServiceNow's FREE course that outlines the value of investing in your user experience.
Platform Tip: Enable actionable knowledge feedback management to identify and address issues like outdated information, broken links, and other content-related problems based on real-time feedback from users on knowledge articles.
User Pain Point #5: “I lack confidence that my ticket/issue will be addressed promptly or at all.”
Goal: Instill confidence in users regarding timely resolution of their issues and enhance visibility into the ticket’s progress.
Streamline Workflow:
- Evaluate current delivery workflows to eliminate redundancy and ensure they are still relevant
Automate Processes to Reduce Manual Effort:
- Use Flow Designer and Integration Hub to establish efficient and dependable fulfillment workflows, minimizing manual intervention.
Mitigate Single Points of Failure:
- Implement assignment groups rather than individual approvers and utilize Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to prevent tickets from becoming stalled due to absences or unavailability.
Enhance Visibility of Ticket Progress:
- Provide Status: Provide methods for users to monitor the status of their ticket and give them updates as to where the request is in the process.
- Standardize notification formats (email, push notifications, etc.) to ensure users can easily monitor and track essential details about their requests (ex: ticket numbers, short descriptions), to provide context. Use clean and consistent branding and contextual language. Review Email Notification Templates and display additional fields as needed
- Define and configure logical filters for “My Requests” : expose additional fields and provide helpful information to the requestor on the portal (ask your users what details they would like to see).
- Note: ServiceNow admins should review ServiceNow Documentation and best practices before making any changes to default configurations in your instance.
Helpful Resources:
Hear directly from experts as ServiceNow and register for the FREE User Experience Leading Practices Course! This course provides an in-depth overview of portal and user experience leading practices!
