Hello, and welcome to the Cask 
Distillery Podcast, where, once again,   we unlock the potential of ServiceNow with 
expert insights and practical strategies,   only here on the Cask Distillery 
Podcast. And today, we are going   to be talking about leveraging UI and UX 
to drive successful employee experience. And I have with me another very special guest: 
Ryan Curtis. And to give him a quick intro,   Ryan is our senior UI/UX designer. He’s had 
extensive art direction experience—about 20   years of combined agency and freelance 
experience—under his belt. And Ryan has   worked on some of our top 15+ clients. I think 
it’s probably quite a bit more than that now. But thank you for taking time, Ryan, 
to jump in with us and talk about   UI/UX and how we’re driving successful 
employee experience. Thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure, Sean. It’s great 
to be here. I love talking about my   work and all the great stuff Cask 
does. So, thanks for having me. It’s awesome. And I love your work. I’ve 
got a chance to see a lot of Ryan’s work.   For those of you who listen to the show 
regularly, you know I’m a client architect,   so I work with all the different what 
we call “practices” and people that do   the real work here. And it’s impressive. 
And what I want to start out with is what   do you discuss with customers to be able 
to build a valuable UI/UX, first of all? Yeah that’s usually early in the process when 
we start having those conversations. And that’s   really where it starts is conversations. And, in 
a nutshell, I would say to really understand what   the challenges are that the customer’s facing 
and how to get them where they need to be is   understanding the current state (where they’re 
at) and then understanding where they want to be,   what is their end vision, where do they want to 
take this portal, and what kind of features and   functions and what kind of things do 
they want to give to their employees. So I think of myself as the trail guide. They 
know where they are and they know where they   want to be, but they don’t really know how 
to get there. All the paths in between. I   bring the experience and the knowledge, 
and I’ve tracked this path before with   other customers. So that’s how I see it and 
see myself as that role. Just try to not boss   them around but lead them to where they really 
want to be, not where I think they should be. And a lot of that starts with 
just discussions/workshops.   I really want to dig into pain points, really 
want to understand their frustrations first and   foremost. It’s almost a therapy session 
where I’m just like, “Tell me all your   problems. Tell me what’s not working, whether 
it’s on the fulfiller side or the requester,   the employee side, whatever it is.” That’s not 
only valuable for me but my other teammates as   well that work on the project, because they get 
a little bit of insight into workflows and other   things that may affect their work stream. The 
biggest thing is to dig into their pain points. And I also try my best to convey what the 
expectations are of my process and what   they’re going to get from me. And I’m not going 
to solve every problem. I can’t do everything,   but I try to lay that foundation to 
help them understand the big benefits,   and really how UX and UI can enhance out-of-box 
ServiceNow. Out-of-box ServiceNow is great,   but it can be so much better. 
It’s just that base level. So I try to set those expectations early 
and just help them understand my world,   because often they don’t. So I try to 
give them those visuals and help them   understand what I do and how important it is 
for their user populace and their employees. It’s not magic. It’s method. It really 
is. There’s no fairy dust or anything   included. It’s a proven methodology 
used all over different industries. Yeah. You said something that really—I know 
we at Cask all generally think this way,   but it really touches my heart: making 
sure you’re an advisor. And some people   can lord things over people and “No, this 
is the way to do it.” It’s more about what   is the best for the client—where they’re at 
and what they’re doing. And along with that,   how do we go from getting something like 
an idea all the way to validation faster? Yeah, we were seeing more of this where 
clients—and it’s great. You don’t want   to boil the ocean. You don’t want to try to solve 
every problem all at once, but focus. Have a more   focused effort to focus on a specific problem. Go 
from idea to solution faster. And that’s really   where the agile methodology comes in on a larger 
scale, where you’re very dedicated to having a   set of smaller problems that you can tackle one 
by one in a fast-paced, more focused, iterative   solution rather than a more traditional waterfall 
solution, where you’re doing two-week sprints, and   you’re going from workshops and requirements all 
the way up to an actual demo of a completed tool. Embodying that agile methodology 
or incorporating some of those   processes or working styles into actual 
organizational executions is important.   Just being able to be more faster, a little 
more reactive, a little more innovative. Other things I’ve seen work that really bring 
ideas to life faster is validation. We can create   whatever you want, but until you test it with 
the people who are actually going to be using it,   you don’t really know if what we’re doing is 
right. So a big part of that is validation. And sometimes it’s difficult to get on people’s 
calendars. Everybody’s busy these days. It’s   hard to identify testers and say, “Okay, 
these people would be great to test this,   but we need more than a week to give them 
time to do that.” If there’s any way that   organizations can have a little bit more of a 
council, like a representative from different   parts of the org that can always be available to 
test new solutions and be aware of things that are   happening and give input and feedback on these 
technologies and tools that the organization’s   bringing to life. So the more you can expose that 
to people who are actually using it, I think,   the better. Cause then you’re not just guessing, 
you actually are validating. And if you have a   set group of people that are ready in the wings to 
get their eyes and ears and hands on those things.   you can move a lot faster. And I believe we at 
Cask have an offering that’s similar to that:   just a very short, dedicated, focused, innovation 
sprint really is, I think, is how we sell that. So we do things just like it’s . . . yeah. So, to the validation point we’re at now going 
from “I did a validation.” So once you get it in,   the other thing that I’ve seen, and I know you’ve 
seen this too, or we see it at Cask as well,   is the user adoption issues. The challenge 
to actually get users to the portal. We’ve   done all this work. How do we get users 
actually to the portal in your opinion? I don’t wanna say that’s not my job; 
that’s definitely my job. But I think   a lot of that also comes with OCM. 
Making people aware of what’s coming.   Organizations doing a good job or preparing 
their people and communicating the benefits. So I think OCM (organizational change 
management) has a significant part of   the pie there to really drive 
adoption and get buy-in and   find those change champions and identify 
those people and drive that awareness.   Even lack of user engagement—things I’ve been 
talking about—interviews with people early in the   design process, hearing what employees are saying, 
building out personas—snapshot representations of   people and user groups—mapping and understanding 
their journeys. What does onboarding look like?   What does requesting a new computer look 
like? What are these various workflows,   and where are the drop offs? Where are the poor 
parts—the frustrating parts—of that process? Because often, you don’t need to revamp 
the entire process. There’s usually just   one or two parts in that process that are 
the pain points. So identifying those and   being able to focus on those, you can make a 
significant improvement much faster instead   of trying again to reshape the entire 
process that your workflows are using. Other barriers to portal adoption, I would say 
accessibility and just poor visual styling.   It can function great, but if it’s not easy to 
navigate or easy to read or use from page to page,   or if there’s a lot of lingo that 
is just overly IT or HR jargon,   it just creates that many more barriers. So, 
your goal is to meet the users where they are,   using natural human language—words that 
people say—not overloading people with jargon,   making things consistent on every page. The 
same content is found in the same area of the   page from department to department. It’s 
not just the Wild West, where the IT page   looks completely different than the HR page, looks 
completely different than the finance page. So the   more consistency you can bring, it’s just such a 
smoother, more frictionless experience for users. So you’re saying you don’t really want 
one page to look like a—and I’m dating   myself here—like a MySpace page 
and then the rest of it looking   like a ServiceNow page. You don’t want 
it going crazy. Yeah, totally get that. And you mentioned, you got into this a little bit 
with accessibility, or you mentioned it. I wanted   to take a moment and kind of highlight that. 
What is accessibility and why does it matter? Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s 
a big topic these days, especially,   I think, since COVID. Now everybody is 
much more working on their machines,   their laptops. And what accessibility is 
is it’s really taking intentional steps   to removing barriers to consuming content for as 
many people as possible, including people who are   maybe blind or colorblind, deaf or hearing 
disabled, or any other kind of disability.   One in four people in the US are disabled. 
So that’s a huge percentage and factor. So, organizations, they need to treat everybody 
equally. Adhering to government standards which   is where accessibility has come now. It’s a 
government standard, different levels. But,   there’s been a few cases when a company 
doesn’t intentionally adhere to those,   they’ve been faced with massive fines. Lots 
of penalties and court charges or court cases,   and that’s no fun for anybody. Nobody 
wants to face a discrimination case   just because they maybe didn’t know 
or weren’t really educated as to why. The bottom line is it matters at the bottom 
line: the money. But it’s also just treating   everybody equal and making sure that your 
content—your information—is accessible   to everybody. Those critical services, 
critical information that everybody needs. Some of that lies in my court. And a lot 
of it lies in the developer’s court—in   content publishing and content creation. 
Things like color, contrast, font size,   even just page layout, information hierarchy. 
If you can imagine someone who’s blind using   a screen reader and the screen reader 
goes up and down the page left and right,   and if things just don’t make sense in terms 
of layout or labels, that’s very confusing   to the user because it doesn’t make sense 
from an information hierarchy standpoint. But then there’s also behind-the-scenes 
things—alt text, HTML tags, audio descriptions,   closed captioning—a lot of things that 
I think people may take for granted but   is critical for a lot of employees out 
there. So it is very important. And a   lot of it is behind the scenes. You don’t 
really see it, but it’s highly effective,   and it’s highly valuable, and it makes a 
great positive impact for all employees. So in the last question I wanted to ask you, 
my background was graphic arts, as we discussed   earlier, and I know UI/UX is visual, and sometimes 
people really need to actually see the art of   the possible. I know we’ve got somewhere we can 
send them. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, sure, Sean. We are just in the 
middle of creating this thing. We’re   calling it the Demo Hub—the Cask Demo Portal Hub. So basically what it is is it’s an 
e-commerce site, almost. You’re shopping   around and looking at some of the work we’ve 
done. It’s very simple design of a site,   but it’s somewhere you could go 
to interactively look at all the   visual design and the portals we’ve 
done here at Cask. So it’s almost— Envision a lot of case studies. Each 
page is a case study of one customer,   and it has some information on what was their 
challenges, what were they facing, what was their   issue with the platform. And then how did we come 
in and solve it. Bring them innovative thinking   and solutions. And what were the results. Maybe 
if we have some metrics to showcase and say, “This   made a great positive impact here,” or, “Smoothed 
out some things with employees over here.” We try   to showcase the results as well, because that’s 
really what matters when it comes down to it. But like you said, the great part is the visual 
stuff, the eye candy. Case studies are great   to read about. The big wall of words can be 
interesting. But yeah, a picture can speak a   thousand words. Really trying to be better at 
showcasing the great work we do. Cause I don’t   think we do that enough on our website. 
So we’re trying to try to change that. That’s great. That’s all the time we have 
for today. And thank you so much, Ryan,   for taking time out of your busy schedule to join 
us. I do want to mention that we will have a link   in the description to that resource 
that Ryan mentioned as soon as we can   get it up. I do want to ask you, as always, 
that if you can like, subscribe—basically,   give us suggestions, anything you want to see, 
because really we’re here for you as the listener,   watcher, however, you’re consuming 
this. And for today, that’s it. Thank you so much and take care. Bye bye.