Plan Guided Tours
Summarize
Summary of Plan Guided Tours
Planning guided tours in ServiceNow is crucial to effectively assist users in navigating the platform, whether for user interface orientation or task completion. Proper planning ensures tours are clear, purposeful, and accessible in the appropriate environment, enhancing user adoption and efficiency.
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Key Features
- Purpose Definition: Decide if the tour explains the UI or guides users through specific tasks, breaking down goals into manageable steps.
- Tour Accessibility: Deploy tours on production systems to support routine task execution or on non-production systems for training without affecting live records.
- Unique Tour Naming: Use intuitive names reflecting the tour’s objective (e.g., “Create a New Incident”) and customize instructions to avoid data conflicts, such as duplicate entries.
- User Knowledge Consideration: Tailor content complexity to accommodate varying user expertise, ensuring clear comprehension from the start.
- Trigger Selection: Define triggers for each callout step to control progression through the tour based on user actions and UI elements.
- Callout Usage and Placement:
- Place callouts precisely on target UI elements, highlighted in blue, for clarity.
- Account for tab visibility by instructing users to open necessary tabs before proceeding.
- Minimize callouts on dynamic-content fields to prevent tour interruptions due to delayed refreshes.
- For pop-up windows, attach callouts on the originating page and guide users within callout instructions, as callouts cannot be placed inside pop-ups.
- Customize callout appearance on Service Portal for visual consistency with portal pages.
- Auto-launch Capability: Configure tours to start automatically on users’ first visits, supporting sequential launching of multiple tours to introduce concepts progressively.
Key Outcomes
By following these guidelines, ServiceNow customers can design guided tours that are purposeful, user-friendly, and adaptable to different environments and user skill levels. Proper use of triggers and callouts ensures smooth navigation through the tours, while auto-launch options facilitate structured learning experiences. This results in enhanced user engagement, better training efficiency, and reduced errors in task execution.
Planning is essential before entering a guided tour into the system. Create an outline and include any assumptions to assist you during the tour creation.
Planning a guided tour
- Purpose of the tour
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Decide whether to create a tour that describes a user interface or one that helps users complete a task. Conduct research and break down the main goal into clear, manageable steps.
- Accessibility of the tour
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Enable the tour on your production system to help users perform routine tasks like ordering from the Service Catalog or creating incidents. If your aim is to train users to explore these tasks without creating real records, provide the tour on your non-production system.
- Name of the tour
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Choose a unique, intuitive tour name that clearly indicates its purpose, like “Create a New Incident” or “Review the Incident List”.
Customize the instructions so that each user creates a unique record. For instance, if the tour instructs users on how to create a group called "Facilities," you can avoid duplicate name errors for subsequent users by prompting them in a callout to assign a unique value to the group name field.
- User's knowledge about the task
- Not all users who take the tour have the same knowledge level. Evaluate the information needed to make sure that participants comprehend the content from the start.
- What page should the tour start on?
- What steps are important to accomplish the objective?
- How should a user navigate from one step to the next?
Selecting triggers
Triggers are actions that you take to move the tour to the next step. Each callout in a guided tour step has a specific trigger that activates the subsequent step. You define the trigger for each callout, and only relevant triggers appear based on the UI element referenced by the callout.
For more information, see GTD triggers.
Using callouts
You must place a callout on top of an element to interact with it. The element is highlighted in blue when it’s selected as the target.
In the following example, it looks like the callout is pointing to the context menu icon, but notice that the header bar is highlighted blue.
This example depicts the correct placement of the callout for the context menu. Notice that the context menu icon is highlighted blue.
- When you place a callout on a form that contains tabs, consider that a user may not have the tab open for viewing. Create a new callout that instructs the user to first open the tab before proceeding with the rest of the tour.
- When adding callouts to fields with dynamic content, keep them minimal. If users can’t locate the associated tour element due to a delayed page refresh, the tour may end unexpectedly.
- When you guide a user through pop-up windows, add your callout to the originating page on or near the pop-up icon. Within the callout instructions, guide your user through the steps intended for the pop-up window, because callouts can’t be added to the pop-up window.
- While the color of a callout is static in the Standard platform UI, you can customize callouts on Service Portal. Consider using this capability to make sure that a consistent look-and-feel between your callouts and your Service Portal pages.
Auto-launching your tour
Automatically start a tour if you want users to take the tour on their first visit to the page.
You can choose to launch multiple tours automatically from a single starting page. You can set the auto-launch order so that users start the second tour on their second page visit, the third tour on their third page visit, and so on. Use this option if you want to begin with an introductory tour and then add more complex or focused follow-up tours.