[Music] hey welcome to service sharp this is a podcast all about service now we will be talking strategy architecture technology just everything service now we are not affiliated with service now the opinions expressed our own weird just a couple of people that are very passionate about the platform so hope you'll join us for every episode and without further ado here we go hey welcome to service sharp this is a podcast all about service now we will be talking strategy architecture technology just everything service now we are not affiliated with service now the opinions expressed our own weird just a couple of people that are very passionate about the platform so hope you'll join us for every episode and without further ado here we go all right welcome back this is Jason Gibson with Service sharp I have Brent Peters and Randy Hoss with me we are talking today about portal and about user experience so without further ado and Brent and let you introduce yourself you and Randy brent Peters systems architecture service now or on the ServiceNow app yes yeah door for service now yeah Randy Hawes just a guy that like service now so that's awesome we're talking about worlds and one of the first things I wanted to talk to you about is something that I see pre pretty frequently that people are building a portal and they don't know who they're building a portal for they so to be a little bit straightforward here a portal is not for your IT department your portal is for your end users and but who is that exactly and and how do you build it for them right do you have any thoughts on that I have all kinds of thoughts well I kind of do on that there there now when you're saying portal you mean the the website the end user goes to and talks and looks for information it's in their tickets checks on statuses that kind of stuff when I think portal I think of any of those type of websites that you do in the service portal so it's not just the end user site you also have the timesheet portal ppm now has a portal there's all kinds of different portals in there but ya end user when your no matter what kind of portal you're you're doing end user or you're doing something for timesheets or you're doing some other special for portal you do need to focus on the end user the customer that's going to be using it so you got to make it formatted for them easy for them that kind of stuff yeah I think that's this is so important because you know we frequently get the question about how do you get buy-in how do you get the program to roll forward and and if the company engaged this is where you do it is is that the portal where the customer meets the product you gotta knock it out of the park yes yep well and I find that portals everybody wants to redo the portal firmware the out-of-the-box configuration there's a lot of things you can do to configure it staying within the realm of ServiceNow and actually not have to do major customizations or adding widgets branding is the number-one thing yeah in there and put in your colors your your company colors or color color schemes that kind of stuff that that's the easiest thing to do you know I was talking to a customer today about putting changing the colors in their portal the overall colors and so changing the bootstrap colors so for the people that don't really know what that is that's kind of the standard colors are there in the system in the in the portal and you can change those basic and basic colors by using you know your your portal editor editor so you go in there and you can actually go in into the designer and change that and you can change in it one place and it changes it throughout the portal those kind of things are a good idea to to brand in that into that granularity um I kind of do because it makes if you can make it familiar syczyk to the employee so one of the one of the customers mainly I've worked in like healthcare so one of our customers that they wanted the portal done they wanted it to be the same colors and the same look and feel as their SharePoint sites that the nurses use every day so it just made the nurses or the customers at that point more comfortable in using it oh this is just another extension of this even though it's two separate apps it just made it more comfortable form so you got to kind of look at that kind of stuff so yeah just a branding kind of change their view on it and made them go oh okay I can do this what it makes them not think that they went to some click the wrong link if you would and went to a site that's spoofing them we're trying to steal their information or something to that effect yes that's kind of what I feel when I go from one site to another and I'm like mmm something doesn't feel right it just doesn't seem or look the same yeah it kind of puts some of these okay this is our it has our logo it has our color scheme just the phone numbers to our service desks that kind of stuff so yeah branding is is a good way to make them comfortable to start with yeah absolutely and so I want to go a little bit further and talk about I hear constantly that you need to be Amazon like or that we need a canoe to make it eat where any user can can get through and understand it and developing it basically what I call for the least common denominator right you know it's it's that low point yeah when I started in IT they used to say hey you know write your manuals for a third grader well nowadays whenever you're starting to do websites and developing technology for people you can't really say design it for a third grader because third graders started using iPhones when they were babies so they know technology better than most people so designed for the older in generation so that it's easy to use for the baby boomers yeah well I'm you know close to that older generation so I can understand that but yes you got to make it simple you got a which out of the box is not that bad it's a little busy in my view but they try to get as much info on one page as possible but you know that's a common mistake that IT people make when designing stuff is trying to jam everything into one area and you really need to keep it super simple and you know here Amazon but I always think of Apple I mean the reason why three-year-olds can pick up iPhones and figure them out and the reason why you know grandparents can pick them up and for the most part figure out all the basic functions it's because they spent a lot of effort and time figuring out how to make it the simplest most useful interface that they could do yes and that's one of the reasons I really hate it when people talk about Amazon if you go to Amazon it is not a simple site if you've never been to Amazon it you do have some basics okay I need to shop and there's a search and then you know but it's not really a simple website and go to Amazon and try to get a chat I mean yeah they're not easy to find no there's a reason right okay I just brought up and out of the box portal and I have not seen this in a while and yeah it's very busy I remembered it being busy but this is busier than what I remembered so they went even further but I'm gonna tell you that yeah but I see people take that one that's already a little busy and make it so much busier they want everything on that front page I get it you want to reduce clicks absolutely but reducing clicks in sacrificing the UI and the end is just not gonna get you where you want to go right one thing that I will have to say that if if because portals not that hard to do but widgets are a little different so if you don't know angular language and all that kind of stuff building a custom widget is kind of kind of fun but there are some out-of-the-box widgets that you know you can always go out and add your tweaks to so you can make it a instance of that widget on that page so cleaning it up it can be kind of easy but you know moving things around renaming things does help and try to keep it clean pointed towards your customer that's going to be using it yeah clean and simple but also don't change the functionality of the system there's a reason that it that you there is the button that allows you to create an incident right there's a reason that there's a button that goes to the catalog I've seen customers come in and go well we're gonna have it create for example an interaction and so instead of an incident it creates an interaction that goes to the service that service desk gets overloaded Chat Chat goes crazy everything gets insane and they want to change it back and I so I've seen that happen many times before where they change the functionality a core functionality not just any punch but a core functionality and they're not really usually very happy with it because you know the long-term strategy is keeping it simple keep it as a de box as possible with the configurations and the that you can do now you said it you can take all that stuff off the bottom clean that up make two but make three buttons and you can do that without any kind of customization right yep oh that's clever you want me to do yes you don't people don't understand that when you're messing with a portal as long as you're not changing widgets in the code itself now that doesn't mean configuring widgets you can configure a widget yes yep but if you're going in and you're changing the code and you're copying the widget and you're using the copy that's that's a little different but there's so much you can do to make it better without doing any of that right now you can do that but you can make it better without having to do that so it is kind of a you know point click they do have the designer the page designer in the widget designers that kind of stuff so that helps kind of move your long point you where you need to go but to go back here don't change the functionality think I really agree with that the point of this portal is to kind of help the customer do a self-service kind of thing the original portal that they had the content one it was a employee self-service so it was pointed to her cell service they call it service portal now but it's still self-service she try to automate so that the middleman doesn't get in there if I open a a request for to order a laptop I don't want that to go to the service desk every time I want it to go to the people that are gonna actually give me the laptop okay so try to make those as streamlined as possible yeah it's hard and I know people want an easy button right they want an easy button they want to walk in and say and in their air some of that was service now yeah what an easy button get go get chat with a with with a virtual agent because you can build the conversations and that's an that is a fairly simple vert and very wonderful system to create that kind of easy button but don't try and create an easy button without the easy button yeah I I don't know I've had the request of having a button that would just you know pretty much read the mind of the user and log a ticket for him that's not gonna happen no window no you can't do that but I can give them three buttons and say click the one that pertains to what you want if you look at the portal there was the last portal there's one portal that I have this that is your catalog which is request something your incident which is something's broken you know and knowledge which is knowledge which often we change to policy or whatever they want but they're those are three basic just very distinct things and if something broken are you requesting something or do you want knowledge I don't see why they they keep coming back sometimes and going you know we just don't know where to go right and that's another thing or you were talking about earlier you got to point it towards your customer what are the customers going to be doing if you if you don't talk to your customer at least talk to your service desk and say hey when the customers call in what do they say well this is broken okay well then it but something broken and they click that or I need to reorder something well okay put a button that says order order here or something like that so you kind of have to kind of lean lean towards their language of how they do things two things in a reason I think that's extremely important do your research take the time to figure out how the customer is doing how they generally like to interact with the system and then design it to match what your culture is yes because that makes that makes a huge difference you want it to be as natural as possible and it's it's not easy but you I mean you can break it down into smaller categories and drive them through the process if you know enough about what what they're going to be looking for you know right I'll never forget the first knowledge I went to Netflix presented their their portal and this was way back before oh my goodness this was a Eureka what yeah Eureka or yeah I think so one Eureka and anyways they had their portal looking just exactly like the Netflix catalog jumping so people walked up and may have a little movie cover and it said something broken and they had another movie cover and it said need to get something and you know what I mean and the people could just drive right through it and their adoption rate the skyline you know because they're so service adoption rate was sky high with it because of how much thought they put into it but you've got to do that you've got a yeah you got to plan it out you got to get their buy-in there their help on that kind of stuff and focus towards them I can go ahead Jason no just go say there's there's nothing wrong with customizing it to and in even doing those massive customizations and building the widgets and really making it your own there's nothing wrong with that as long as you understand that you will then you will support those widgets right right yep yeah once you clone a widget it's yours they're not going to support it for you but yeah I mean getting that going is but you know even if you don't clone a widget you can take the order something button that they already have on there and pull it up in designer and change the word verbage that kind of stuff so but it also goes to if you order something you click that and then you have 600 categories and in your catalog that's gonna be an issue too so you have to keep keep all of the design of the portal and your catalog and how the forms look and that kind of stuff towards your customer because the customer is not going to fill out a form it has 600 questions on it they're just gonna go never mind I'm calling the phone the phone number and waiting on hold for 20 minutes yeah my rule of thumb is is pretty much constantly in each catalog item there kind of nut catalog item in each category there doesn't need to be more than 10 or 12 items if you can get to it now but you don't need more than 10 or 12 counter categories either so there's a balancing act if you have a human analog you've got to be able to balance you don't want anything with one in it because I was just ridiculous right right so you you got to do that but you also there are some exceptions to that by the way that I've run into with like hardware because it's kind of hard if they have if they allow anybody in their dog to in the corporation to log in and order whatever they want from the system like cables you've got to have every cable that is available in there so you could end up having 100 cables as different items but that air is there is those exceptions but you also want to keep it as easy and categorized as as a customer would think so you know you're not going to put something about network cards you're gonna say computer accessories or something that they're used to like a but if you go to Best Buy you're not gonna be looking for specific things you they categorize them that way so you kind of have to look at that kind of stuff especially towards how your customers call the things back to that we can't forget there's a great search function as IRAs now yes you need to I think you should you should work as you know very hard on showing and teaching your users to use the functionality of search now a lot of people have said to me it's the worst search ever I never can't find anything and I and I have an answer for that because what has happened is there are metadata in every one of those catalog items and if you haven't put the correct metadata in there in there they're not going to be able to find it right back title it goes back to what does a customer call it right metadata do your research get that in there because that will help everybody I have recently in the last year so redesigned the service portal for our corporate users use and whenever we sat down to do this analysis of flour we were going to design it what would be guessed for our customers we talked to customers that kind of stuff one of the options that was kind that brought up was don't put any buttons just have the search and everything goes through search they go in and what do you want today so we we looked at doing that and whenever we tested against our customers we gave them two options they liked the one that had the three buttons and the search option so we went with that but that was what's giving us customers so but you're right on the search meta you have to put in you have to be able to to target that to the stuff that they're gonna search for one of the one of the best things is we have a leave request form in our system and so we call a leave request well some of the customers were calling it paid time off form that kind of stuff so we had to go in and update them the search functionalities - so that those keywords could be searched also so just an update for that you do and it's all continuous its continual improvement right I mean you constantly have to be updating metadata and if you are like most of us and you don't have a team of 47 you know it is difficult sometimes so put things on a schedule you know when you get it done say I'm gonna address metadata you know in September of every year you address that metadata you know you make scheduled times to do those kind of improvements with the system especially when it comes to you know making it functional forgery in juicer right you have a question for you Jason okay how do you feel about him personalizing the way the portal for your customer for each individual customer so I'd like that I like some things like you come to numerically I mean like you know you bring it up and it says hello Brent yeah I I think it's really unique I think it's really neat I don't think it has it doesn't add any functionality but it does give that hey that's cool feeling to it anything more than that because that's actually something you can do fairly easily yep anything like major stuff might be a little more sketchy to me but little stuff like that I think it's great the two things that our customers liked when I redesign the portal was that one of them was the said hello Brent because it acknowledged that they were somewhere that knew who they were so they it I don't know they kind of liked it gave him a warm fuzzy feeling I guess the other thing that we implemented very custom very very custom kind of thing is we allowed them to make catalog items and knowledge articles mark his favorites and they really liked that because they could customize it well they're not customizing the page but now they have a place that they can go and it's a custom list of things that they do there all the time so it really like that pretty cool I saw that when we were looking at your that the other day I thought that was really a neat thing I don't know the question is just the juice is worth the squeeze is a friend of mine I don't know I don't know the answer that but if you're in the user is very if they're in the portal a lot and that's really important to them and you've talked to them and that's something that they want I don't see why you wouldn't just jump at building something I it's weird because we didn't we redesigned our portal we had the out of the box with a few customizations on it and it was people are like I this is kind of clunky we didn't like how it works that kind of stuff so we sat down and we did the redesign we talked to the customers that kind of stuff but we didn't do a huge marketing thing other than hey the site's outdated it's gonna look a little different here's a video tutorial on how to use it and our usage actually in the next week as soon as I deployed it that full week and the next week our use on that portal tripled and it has actually stayed at that level since then it goes up and down every one saw but we tripled our users by doing that because people are like oh my gosh this works is huge and that's also why I really like the agent the virtual agent as well because you think it drives that same kind of engaged I could see that yeah so yeah it's it's amazing and guy is is a work in progress so we're gonna it's it's crawl walk run right right go get your portal to where it's looking pretty good out of the box and then move it up from there move it up from there how many of the portal have you done for that company the my full-time job let's see about four or five major revisions here there are certain things like a couple we couple months ago we added the system status button to our portals ling-su go see what's going on kind of stuff so we added that but yeah major additions four or five since since we have put put it out there and it's just gotten more use ever since plus I'm gonna tell you I will say and in in later podcasts when we're doing video we're gonna do some showing of things but I'm gonna tell you that that portal that you built for that organization the most current one is my favorite portal that I have seen in years so you know it's it's a really great portal or it's very simple very you know straightforward it still has the same thought process it's didn't change the functionality of Zermatt we didn't change yeah we didn't change the functionality but it is a it's what I always preach not to do they have somebody like you that can support it mara companies don't have somebody like that you could that can support it right and it's not like we went and made custom functionalities what we did was we didn't like the shape of the buttons so we went and took the cloned the the icon widget and we just changed the code so that we could have a round button or we did this and also it one like we changed all the background functionality we just changed it so we could change the look so some of it is background function but one area that it's okay to customize different effective is the end-user experience yes right when I what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let's take a quick break let's listen to our sponsor take a moment now remember guys we are not affiliated or associated with ServiceNow anyway yeah we are just a few nerds I absolutely love ServiceNow and think that it's like the best thing so so again just just understand that and we will be back after these quick words this podcast was made with anchor anchor is the easiest way to create and publisher podcast it's free creation tools with it allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer helps you distribute your podcast it's super simple to publish to Spotify Apple podcast Google Play any of the major ones you can make money from your podcast there's no minimum listenership so they make it super easy to monetize it's really everything you need to make a podcast in one place so why don't you go out and download the free anchor app or go to anchor FM and get started alright we're back this is Jason Gibson again with you with bread and Randy and Sarah sharp we are talking about end user experience and in the in the portal we've talked a little bit about when it's when it's right to customize and when it's not and I wanted to make a point about that and it's very simple because if you have the team to support it today but you don't necessarily think that you'll have the team to support it forever right so then don't do it if you think that no we got the right people we were always going to have somebody to support it then building in those just those configurations and customizations on the portal can deliver really good results inside you know your organization with your engine and it might and and it might be worth it right but it might not so it goes down to the business case just make your business case make sure that the that the desire and the need and the benefit outweighs the the the customization issues which are upgrade stuff and making sure that if they change something you have to change something with them things to that effect well I agree especially on my current support I mean it's not always something you're gonna know when you're gonna have those support forever because things change quite a bit but I would say that you need to just as any software development platform you have you need to have a good documentation policy you ought to have a run book somewhere that says this is this is the add-ons we created and this is the reason why we did that and you know it doesn't have to be an exhausting novel it can just be the you know name of the add-on this is the table that we traded this is you know the hooks and everything like that so that's people coming in later can read that bit up speed you know I did something absolutely you know and the nice thing is if you do that kind of documentation and you do the kind of commentating in your code that's another really important thing the the people who are doing it need to comment the code really well so build it a try comment the code do great documentation put in your knowledge base there's no reason why you couldn't put in your knowledge base all the things that you've changed you don't have to put it on an Excel spreadsheet somewhere so no I think it's just a good idea to do and I know documentation can be a drag but it's not just for future users it's for you too because I mean I don't know about you but I could get up and go get a coast and come back and forget what I was today I was about I really wish I commented mystic I was about to say the same thing because I go back and look at the script and go okay what was I doing here oh yeah I have a comment that's what I was doing so yes yeah it helps me when I go back a year and half later to go okay now how did I do this so anyway you learn it you make it up mistake you go back and you go I have no idea what I have been on this and they've spent two hours trying to figure out how you created it in the first place and you learn oh you know I need to I need to share back with this yep yep I got a question and I this is gonna be ignorant on my part because I haven't really kept up with the portal whole stupid questions ServiceNow adopted gamification printables and stuff like that for the portal is that available and what are your thoughts on it if it is I don't think they really have yet yeah they're if it's getting better every remission that they come out with but there's a lot of things that would be nice to stay at well and I'm not sure I'm not sure I understand what you mean by gamification of it well gamification is that just a principle where in order to drive user engagement you give you know badges and things like that and so you earn points for submitting tickets on the on the portal or you earn points for voting on a knowledgebase article or something like that and as you earn points interacting with the system your badge goes up you know maybe showing that you're you know whatever level and it's it's a simple psychological hook to get people to get people engaged you know it's weird well that does work quite a bit on the ServiceNow developer portal I'll be right there yeah but but I don't think the individual borders yet they do go out for feedback in but there's no point system yet that is kind of a neat thing that maybe one of us should look at creating for for service now and maybe an idea that might be a good custom app you know like well it'd have to be custom within the yeah you'd have to come up with some kind of widgets and scoring and that kind of stuff and portal yeah I mean really yeah yep you can make it Star Wars theme that everything is I'm sorry the Nerds coming out on me right now actually if you're gonna if you're gonna do it it did be better probably to do that towards the organization so I already said healthcare where I've done most stuff so you know you could do it all healthcare terms has to be thought out really carefully because you know nobody once Louis badge is always IT person HR approve my badges and not worry about that part exactly get feedback from marketing yeah that actually is kind of a cool idea I don't know maybe on my spare time all I'll ping something out spare time what's that yeah exactly [Music] well what else anything else hey what are you in a hurry are there wanna hear us sit here and just be silent yeah that's true I mean you know watch paint dry or something no so yeah so one of the things that I want to talk about that we haven't talked about it and I know that we not a lot of time left but is what Brent's brought up early on and that's the portal ability to reach out to other parts of the organization that aren't IT that aren't looking for source set for self-service things that are custom portals like you know we built a portal for the Stevenson Cancer Center and we've built portals for all kinds of different you know things so what are you what have you seen that you thought was like the coolest portal what do you think everybody should build there's any kind of suggestions around any of that no I mean it's mainly up to what what your needs are for that I mean the self-service portal is probably the most primary one that people would put out news then there are the ones out of the box or get loaded with plugins like the like I mentioned timesheet portal the project portal that kind of stuff you know I've seen I saw a portal with one created I actually was a part of the project would actually didn't build the portal but they built the portal that was built for it was basically its IT staff but they were at tier 1 so they're there they were out in each of the different organizations that were affiliated and so they built a tier 1 portal you know that was a pretty good idea and as far as you know being able to get to the stuff that they're specifically trying to do it was it was good I liked the portal you know the portal outreaches that are not they don't have anything to do with IT I know that's weird but I really like the fact that ServiceNow can reach out to other parts of your organization's I mean the we would work with the police department to do a portal for them to track their contacts with the people that they've been seeing while they were on Patrol you know things to that effect we worked with another customer to create a public forum that they can fill out that saves to encrypted database with pH I so there's lots of cool stuff out there so don't be limited by oh this is only has to be for the IT side it only has to be IT portal now that is the primary focus of what is built out for currently is the ServiceNow applications what could be done exactly just an example what can be done we built a custom application that will aren't allows our nurses to go and rehab their point out there no to log that they've renewed their certifications and that they've taken classes that kind of stuff all this was done through a paper process and with Jason's help and then I took it over once he left my organization went somewhere else and left me sorry we built all that but the customer needed somewhere they could go to check on the statuses and all this kind of stuff so I didn't want to mix that on with their IT their service IT stuff so I built a portal for them to go in they could log it from there they could see the status their directors could go in and approve them all that kind of stuff all from that one portal so it was focused just for that so that was always nice too and they've enjoyed that because it's easy for them to use and it's quicker to build so you say you ask me you know why why build it here why do that a couple reasons for the biggest reason of my personal opinion is because you can build it significantly faster you know the the reality is when you're building a full application and a full portal outside of ServiceNow the development significantly more so it's it's a great place to have it you already own it yep so it you might as well utilize it better right and it it's you if you're storing the data in ServiceNow you might as well pull it out through ServiceNow or input it through it so using the portal is just a great way to do it and if you do your themes correctly and the portal stuff you can have the same theme across all the others it's however you want to do it but it is a quick and easy way once you get the hang of it to create portals I've actually created several now because of that kind of process so it's pretty cool yes I noticed - it seems like I can do some amazing things in the system that don't really get as much recognition as you do a pretty a great thing in the portal but maybe not as amazing or not as great or not as but you're gonna get more visibility and more people coming to the platform every time you do that and the portal is a great way to to really engage the customer and have them start buying in and bringing that back into service now yep all right guys I know this was a little shorter than our normal for our meeting but probably some people relieved about that yeah they're like oh my gosh that's great they're not gonna go so long it was fun but I don't have to hit the fast-forward button so much they're gonna be like hey it's only it only says like 30 minutes or so did they business a complete episode thank you guys and I appreciate you joining me in we've got some other great topics coming up we've been talking about those one I'm particularly particularly excited about so keep in mind that we do love your feedback so get out there drop us our feedback and look at the show notes and we may we may put some fun or interesting or some code in there that we talked about on the show so just I guess until next time I'll see you then thank you sounds good thank you I got enough time [Music]