Simplify user experience with cognitive load principles in Employee Center Pro

Hello everybody and welcome to our Simplify user experience with cognitive load principles on Employee Center Pro. Before we get started, I would just like to start with a little bit of a poll. By a show of hands, how many of you have ever experienced when you're driving in your car, bobbing along, singing a song and suddenly you have to turn your volume down in order to see better? Show of hands, please. Yes, I think a fair few of us have experienced this before and this is a perfect everyday example of cognitive overload or cognitive burden. And today what I'm going to be doing is taking you through as to why it's important to minimize it when it comes to Employee Center and UX design. My name is Nikki Hunter and I'm the pre-sales lead for Thirdera and I'm joined by my very talented colleague Vic, if you'd like to I introduce yourself. - Hi everyone, I'm Vic Mach, I'm the UX/UI lead at Thirdera. - Brilliant, thank you so much. So, let's get started. This is our menu for today. We are going to take you through a little bit of a background around cognitive load and what that means. We are also going to teach you, some cognitive load principles that you can start deploying on Employee Center, straight away. I'm also going to walk you through how you can put that into practice on ServiceNow's Employee Center Professional and finally arm you with some key design questions that you can start asking your users as soon as you depart from here. So with that, let's get started. So, if there's anything I'm gonna do today is to give you these three key takeaways. The first one is some practical tips for minimizing cognitive load. The second one is some user questions which is going to help you identify user behavior and user journeys and you can start asking that straight away from your end users. And finally, some design tips for scalability on success in Employee Center Pro. What's cognitive load? Where does it originate from? An Australian psychologist John Sweller was actually one that's formulated the cognitive loads theory in 1988. And this is around how the working memory has a limited capacity and when information intake exceeds this capacity, cognitive load occurs, which can often lead to errors or abandonment of the tasks that you're working on. If a user finds interaction with an interface difficult, their mental effort or cognitive load is high. We don't want your end users to have to spend time, thinking about how to manipulate an interface, but instead how they can achieve a task quickly and efficiently. And this is why it's really important that we can keep cognitive load to a minimum. So, why should you care? Well, there's been a number of studies that have showed that reducing cognitive load can actually create more efficiencies. A study published in the International Journal of Human Compute Interaction, showed that designs that have been designed with cognitive load in mind, have actually resulted in a lot more efficiencies. And there are some examples to help back this up. A Forester user research study conducted in 2023, show that 88% of people are less inclined to return to a site after a bad UX. So, what this means for you is if you have an initiative to drive portal adoption and a user comes to your portal and they don't find what they're looking for, they're very unlikely to return. And what they might do instead is pick up the phone or go back to their comfort zone and write emails to your service desk, so you truly have one chance to make a good impression. Load times and cognitive load is also an important factor as 47% of consumers actually expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less. Longer load times can increase cognitive load and also frustration, which in turn can result in higher bounce rates and much lower conversion rates. Attention span variations is also another factor to bear in mind. There's been a study, a user behavior study conducted by Microsoft that showed that attention spans vary depending on the task, but for routine tasks it can be as little as eight seconds. So, you have very little time to play with in order for the users to find what it is that they're looking for. So, let's go through a couple of cognitive load principles. The first one is creating familiarity and consistency and what we can do is we can do this by building on existing mental models. People already have a mental model in mind, about how websites should work and this is based on past experiences and everyday lives visiting other websites. Now, when you use labels and layouts that they've encountered on previous websites, their cognitive load and the need to learn reduces. For example, when we go on Amazon, it's very simple, it's very natural. We don't need a user manual or a user guide to use it. So, in our day-to-day lives, we can just go about it and do that. So, think about what familiar elements you can draw out of that and replicate it in your own designs. The second point is around avoiding visual clutter and only showing information that your end users need. So, don't show any irrelevant images or meaningless typography or redundant links, because that can actually slow your users down. And actually what is going to achieve is impair usability, which we don't want and we don't want to overload them in that way. Now it's worth noting that meaningful links and images can actually be a very powerful tool, but just don't overload your users. The third area is around offloading tasks. So look for anything in your design that requires the the users to read text, to remember information or to make a decision. Then look for alternatives. Can you show a picture or re-display previously entered information or perhaps set up a smart default? You won't be able to shift all of the tasks away from your users, but every task you eliminate leaves more mental resources for the decisions that are truly essential for your users. The fourth area is potentially utilizing NUIs. A renowned computer scientist called Bill Buxton, he actually talks about NUIs and discusses how creating familiarity by using NUIs, you can exploit the skills that we have acquired, just by being humans and how you can use those things like speech or gesture and touch and you can really utilize those elements to ensure that you can minimize cognitive load. So for example, as a millennial, I can say this, but for me, using my mobile phone feels incredibly natural. So, if I was to have a portal, in a form of a mobile app, that will reduce my cognitive load, because I'm able to use basic skills such as swiping or even speech by utilizing inbuilt speech recognition tools to find the information that I'm looking for. And finally search first and browse second. Again, in our day-to-day lives, if we are looking for information, what do we do? We Google it. And so that's what we want our users to be able to do is to bring in everyday life experiences and be able to deploy that in the workplace. So, by doing that, you're actually using familiar patterns once again and a really brilliant way to help users find information quickly and efficiently. So, now I know this is an after lunchtime session, so I'd like everybody to please stand up. Let's get the blood pumping. So guys, if you prefer this design on the left, please put your hand on your head. If however you prefer this design, please put your hand on your shoulders. - There is a right answer for this. - There is a right answer. Guys in the front row, what's your preference? Left, up, right, down. Okay, I see a lot of people with their heads on their head and that is the correct answer. So well done, congratulations. You spotted the bad design, which is the right hand side. Please sit. And the reason for that is you can clearly see that on, I think this is the yeah, left hand side, the left hand side showcases announcements that are very specific to the user, it's personalized. You can also see their active items, things that they need to be actioning and that's drawing attention to that. The other design has lots of typography, lots of images and a very clear way to be able to find information. So, how can we put this into practice on Employee Center? So, the first part is visual hierarchies and visual hierarchies are categorized content that can help manage cognitive load by organizing information into easily digestible formats. You can use this on the service catalog, you can use it on My Active Items and you can do that even in My Active Items by being able to display primary information on top and secondary in the bottom. For example, if approvals are very important, you can display that on the top. Equally here you can see the hardware is the main catalog and then underneath are the subcategories. So, it guides your users through a journey and find whatever it is that they're looking for. The second area is unified taxonomy. And again, this is really, really brilliant to help you streamline and organize information across departments. You can also see the mega menu widget, which helps reduce cognitive load by simplifying navigation for your end users so that they can find information as fast as possible. The third one is mobile experience. We've touched on this earlier, but again, being able to utilize an interface that people are already very familiar with, helps them reduce the need to learn anything more. You also have then the My Favorites menu. How many times do you look for things you find it, just to then lose it again? So with my favorites, you're able to my favorite certain different items. You are able to create lists for yourself, so that you can come back to the information at a later point. And finally, enterprise search. So, this is a brilliant feature whereby you can search across the platform and also in the latest Washington release, you can bring in things like SharePoint Online to be able to search through that. So, these are just a couple of areas on the Employee Center that you can start utilizing. And to give you a real life example of where we have done this previously, Vic will walk you through a recent case study and what we've done there. Vic, take it away. - Thanks Nikki. So, for this case study, we were contacted by International Athletic Clothing Company and their current portal was implemented over five years ago with minimum UX work, face usability challenges from their users that they reported. So, they approached us to gain insight of their portal usage and to rebuild their portal using a user-centric design, utilizing Employee Centered Pro. So, from there we actually interviewed over 20 of their users from store managers, floor staff and so on. And what we learned was that they were having issues, finding things quickly, right? Their search results weren't giving them the right requests, Knowledge articles. And another thing was their tickets. They weren't able to find out like the status of it. So, what we did, like you'll see on the top of this mockup here, like we emphasized the search bar, right? We utilized like EC pros like AI search, so they'll be able to find their request items, Knowledge articles right away. And then below that we have our My Active Item widget, which shows their request and they can see the status of it and then they'll be able to do their task where they can reject, approved and see more details. But there's so much more that went into this. But since we launched the portal, we did hear lots of good feedbacks from the users saying like they were able to go in quick, right? Do their tasks and then be able to go back to their daily tasks on the floor. Yeah. - Brilliant. Thanks Vic. Right, it's poll time. So, you guys will need your mobile phone. So, if you wanna get that ready please. So, this is the test you've been paying attention. So, if you had to describe in one word what a good site would look like, what would it be? Any brave volunteers to shout out a word? Familiar, easy. Yes, brilliant. It's a shame 'cause the word cloud was one of my coolest features, but hey, you win some, you lose some. Next slide please Vic. So, I obviously promise you guys to also get some key takeaway questions you can start asking your users. And before I give you those examples, I just wanted to go through the types of questions and I like to divide this into four key buckets. The first one is the so what. So, this is where you're gonna help establish what kind of problems are you looking to solve and what kind of outcomes are you looking to achieve? Are there any KPIs that you're looking to improve on? And how are you going to define success? Equally, what does your current user base look like? Once you establish all of that, then you can move onto your stakeholder questions. And this is really important, because your stakeholders are going to be the ones that are going to sponsor you for your portal redesign or your UX redesign project. So, it's important to understand what's their role in a better UX, what's their personal interest, what kind of outcomes do they want to drive and how are they looking to differentiate. Equally, what is it that keeps them up at night, above the users? Once we have those questions, we can then delve deeper into the user research questions. And those are things like are your users facing at the moment and what do they envision the solution to look like? How often do they encounter those problems and how long does it take for them to find a solution or a workaround? Equally, is there a way that we can showcase the information in a more meaningful way. It's also important to then understand their user journey. So, when they're looking to complete a task, are there too many steps for them to have to follow? Is there a way that we could perhaps simplify that? Once we understand a little bit more about that, then we can start digging deeper into the actual design elements. if you look at your current design, how could this design potentially fail? Is there anything that we can remove or simplify? Why is a certain widget where it is? Is there a way that we could rearrange it in a more meaningful way to make it make more sense? Next slide, please Vic. So, here are some sample questions and please feel free to take pictures of how you can start those conversations with your users to understand their journey better and to be able to have that redesign approach. And I think we're a little bit ahead of schedule, 'cause of my word cloud not working. But it's been a pleasure speaking to you guys today and I really hope that you have a successful portal journey with Employee Center Professional. Please let us know if you have any questions, we can take it over here on the side and have a lovely rest of your Knowledge session. Thank you guys so much. - Thank you. (audience applauding)