Plan Guided Tours
Summarize
Summary of Plan Guided Tours
Planning guided tours in ServiceNow is a critical step to ensure users effectively learn how to navigate and perform tasks within the platform. Guided tours can either introduce users to interface elements or help them complete specific tasks, and they should be carefully designed with clear objectives, appropriate triggers, and user needs in mind.
Show less
Planning a guided tour
- Purpose: Define whether the tour is for UI orientation or task completion, breaking down goals into manageable steps.
- Accessibility: Decide if the tour should run on production (for real task execution) or non-production systems (for training without creating real records).
- Tour Naming: Use unique, descriptive names that reflect the tour’s purpose, and customize instructions to prevent duplicate entries during exercises.
- User Knowledge: Tailor content to accommodate varying user expertise to ensure clarity from the start.
- Additional Considerations: Identify the starting page, key steps, and navigation flow for the tour.
Using triggers and callouts
- Triggers: Define specific actions that advance the tour to the next step. Each callout has an assigned trigger relevant to the UI element.
- Callouts: Place callouts precisely on UI elements, ensuring they highlight the correct target (e.g., icons versus header bars). Misplaced callouts can confuse users.
- Special cases:
- For forms with tabs, add callouts that instruct users to open necessary tabs before proceeding.
- Minimize callouts on fields with dynamic content to avoid tour interruptions due to page refresh delays.
- When guiding users through pop-ups, attach callouts to the originating page and provide instructions within the callout, since callouts cannot be placed inside pop-ups.
- Customize callout appearance on Service Portal for visual consistency with portal pages, though colors are static in the standard UI.
Auto-launching tours
Automatically start tours when users visit a page for the first time. You can configure multiple tours to launch sequentially over subsequent visits, enabling a progressive learning experience that starts with introductory content and advances to more complex topics.
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.