[Music] welcome everyone we'll get started in a few minutes um but welcome to discovering the benefits of optimized user experience live on service now webinar uh while we wait to get started uh please feel free to introduce yourself uh in the chat with your name and your location um so we know where you're calling in from all right so before we do get started uh this presentation uh may contain forward-looking statements that reflect current beliefs of service now and are based on the information available these forward-looking statements should not be relied upon and making purchasing decisions also like all webinars uh these are published to a schedule of upcoming live on service now interactive events uh you could scan the QR code uh to to see that schedule or you could visit the link that will be posted in in the chat a little bit of housekeeping before we jump in so uh we are saving time at the end of our our session today for for Q&A with the panelists um you go ahead and type your questions in the Q&A uh chat uh section at the bottom our presentation today is being recorded uh we will be sharing that on the service now Community uh and also after the event uh there will be a short survey I'd encourage everyone to to uh to fill that out uh that feedback helps us with our future sessions and we thank you in advance uh for that feedback so uh joining us today we have myself my name is Matthew S I'm a senior technical consultant in expert Services here at service now my function is of course user experience and with me today I do have two colleagues uh Andrew swallows who is also a senior technical consultant uh in expert services and Eric Hammer who's a principal solution architect in the employee experience uh on the employee experience team uh gentleman do you want to introduce yourselves real quick I y um I think you did a good job just ux consultant here at expert Services thanks sure hi everyone my name is Eric hemmer and helped start up the employee workflows product line at service now I have been spending time with the more Progressive customers when it comes to employee experience over the years and most recently led the best employee portal contest so later in this presentation I'll be sharing you some of the best examples of employee portals that were designed and deployed by our customers great thanks Eric thanks Andrew all right so for an agenda we're going to learn about ux what is it um what does that term mean what does that mean to me as a user experience uh consultant uh what does that mean to you uh on the platform we're also going to talk through some common challenges that we see with our customers and how we can use user experience to solve those those issues um we're also going to talk about understanding our users um research data uh performing studies lots of good stuff then we're going to talk about getting started with ux how do we take the lessons learned today and how do we practically apply that uh to improve our user experience then we're going to talk through some customer success stories and then of course our next steps what do we do now all right with that we'll we'll start with a poll so if you want to launch the poll and we're going to give you guys a few seconds to fill out the poll okay so got some answers in and I created this poll um and there's no real wrong answer it's more maybe from our perspective you know what is what is the best answer to us and so I'm disclosing that I have a bias right I am about data and my goal on this um this presentation is to show you that you can't pull off an intuitive user interface or develop one um without data without Gathering and talking to your users and empathizing with them the other part that I put in here as a little trick trick here is I've mentioned user interface three times over that's going to drive you towards one of those answers I'm introducing bias there making a trick question and the other thing I want to pull or expose you guys to is user interface is often where we start but you can do research and you X on processes governance you know and you name it so it's not just about interfaces so thanks for participating and that guy let me go to the next slide so ux overall though is about the total experience so it is going to be about that interface um but it's also going to be about what happens after right what happens with the process after it's all aspects so this is our our definition that we're going to begin with with that I'll hand it back over to Matt yeah thanks Andrew so um you know as a as a designer working in the digital space um usually we think of user interface as uh graphical uh representation of a workflow maybe a browser a web app but a user interface could be anything from the buttons on an elevator it could be your umbrella uh it could be the shoelaces that you tie in the morning um so user experience touches every aspect of Our Lives um and we're just working in the digital space um so building for user needs uh it decreases risk and it increases the probability of success so if we're asking a user to complete a task uh we use ux to make sure that it is a great experience and that they want to continue to do that uh that task repeatedly so some common some common pain points so Andrew do you want to talk through these first four yeah we wanted to start off with like what what we see out there um when we're brought in so in this case you know we we have seen feature launches where people question the investment um because the you know it just didn't didn't come off well uh bad processes often I'll be pulled in that there's a problem with the portal the interface uh but it might be a process underneath so again I'm going to hit that again that we can research and we can improve those um but it also matters what happens you know after they take action on the interface um just lack of understanding of how to how to take that Beyond and so that's why I'm I'm hitting that so much today and then just struggling to get um ideas from employees so that's something really from a past life um at a different job of you know getting the innovation ideas how to invest it things like that and then Matt I think you have more items I do so um these are more practical in terms of of a topic we'll talk about a little bit later which is continuous Improvement so user experience is not a set it and forget it solution um so um Comon pain points that that I've seen um with my my customer engagement service now so uh user struggling to find content um just because we've published content doesn't doesn't mean that users will interact with it um we need to discover the best way possible for users to interact with that content and we do that with user experience and interviews and collecting information about how users interact with our our Solutions so um not being able to find content on a portal uh that always results in a search first experience I'm not even as a user going to interact with the interface I'll just search for what I need um and that isn't always the best outcome uh when also see with aging so as portals age uh content is constantly added and features are added without uh understanding priority U so it becomes cluttered and it it's difficult to use uh we also see teams that are that are supporting uh portals on the platform um not really having an understanding of the tools that are available to them from service now um how how to collect information how to collect statistics what are users doing um so helping helping our customers develop that that set of tools on platform a lot of our customers also lack uh a dedicated ux resource on their on their team that supports the portal um so that's where we come in uh helping out with that yes so Andrew what you want to tell us a little bit about ux research we've heard that a couple of times already why don't you why don't you tell us about that I will in a second but we do have two hands up oh great um so I thought we could do see what people have for questions and you guys can also submit questions in the Q&A section uh or in chat I'm trying to watch chat moves really quickly though um so I guess allow uh Daniel unmute you do you have a question okay you should be able to unmute you're muted right now okay um disable move on to the other person Jason Turner you should be able to unmute now all right we'll we'll keep moving on um if you guys have questions uh put them in the uh Q&A area or in the chat thank you oh the F future is not working okay so yeah please put it in the chat I did not I did not realize the unmute was not working um so I'm going to keep going until we see those questions so my area I really you know I spent time as a full-time researcher um and what you know what that means is you know we're we're after data but we're also trying trying to empathize we're also telling a story right of um here's what the users are hitting here are the pain points and also how you know what are some ideas that the users have even on solving those pain points um it's also about the types of data so I'm going to talk more about the types of data in the next slide quantitative and qualitative and then it's also iterative and there's going to be a little process that Matt's going to cover on how you continuous ly improved so if we could go to the next slide Matt and I you know Neilon Norman group has a nice little article out there that I start people off on and when to use what type of user research so this is um from there so I have qualitative and quantitative along the bottom attitudinal and behavioral on the left side and this is roughly or this is kind of when you when you're looking at a problem you're trying to figure out okay do you need to define the problem like where the problem is is how many how much you're in quantitative if you're actually if you have that data and you're trying to figure out okay how do I fix this thing that's qualitative and then the other difference here the other piece of this is behavioral and attitudinal so behavioral what people do add tune on what people say um and you know what people say is a is an interesting one because you may want to know how people feel about a product but if you're asking them a about their behavior a famous example that was introduced to me when I started into the ux field was flossing your teeth and how many people tell their dentists that they maybe floss a little more than they actually do you know they stretch the truth so that's something to watch out with attitudinal um and to recognize when you're getting behavioral so mat if you'll move to the next slide now data shouldn't be completely new to everybody right like some of the stuff here you're going to be very familiar with so you got analytics you know web analytics how many requests are being code in how many views on articles or Pages uh if we move down here we have survey I like to use the employee engagement survey most companies have as an example and then you know when managers follow up they're usually you know if they're talking to their whole team kind of a focus group or interview they may not be very structured but it's that kind of concept other things though that I think people are a little less familiar with and that we try to you know do more of or focus more on is that behavioral side on quality of usability study and field study so I'm going to spend a little more time on those so usability study is testing an interface right and you can sit through you can kind of sit down um with employees and you'll get a bunch of measurements and I'll have an example slide down below um of all of that and then field study is my favorite but it's usually a little more costly because you have to show up where people work you have to literally show up in their working environment and you study them in their working environment and you do tests with them right there rather than asking them to leave the work environment and you also observe them over a period of time and so that comes you know it has some really good um areas to challenge assumptions that in my past as a desk worker maybe didn't know about shop floor workers right and then the different types of shop Flor um I've I've you know been exposed to is like could be a desert right could be a hangar Bay could be all kinds of fun things so I'm G to highlight those two there's plenty more there's many different research but I just kind of grabbed a few of them out there with that we'll go to the next slide yeah Andrew I I um I just recently participated in a a field study uh service now customer field study and what what was really interesting was um we were meeting with a user at their workstation and while we were performing the the uh the field study and some some specific uh tasks we asked that user to complete another user observed and they wanted to participate so it was really interesting uh to see that happen yeah and there's there's pieces we won't you know we won't have time to go into that have to do with your ocm your change management um but maybe we can do that in another another webinar but that's you know the fact that when you're on there and people see it and they they are exposed to what you're doing and they feel like they have a say they feel like ownership that's another kind of benefit so when you that other user saw and came over you know now you're building awareness and adoption but I'm want to leave it there that's really cool though um the next thing I want to talk talk about is bias so when I asked the first poll question I was trying to disclose that I put a lot of bias in there I put bias to drive you towards the highest question that you guys end ended up selecting which is design and develop intuitive user interface right so how you even structure your questions could have bias in it uh but I also just highlighted a few more biases I see and a a researcher is trained to try to remove bias so purposely added in the PLL question to demonstrate how even a PLL question could be biased and I'm trying to be accountable and disclose that bias to you guys um you know we're not going to use that data in any sort of study it's more for an example but we do see a lot of confirmation bias so when we do a study we might take people might take data that we did that resonates with them and only pay attention to that data no long no matter how strong of a pattern other data shows they don't may not want to mess with that there's acquiescence bias this is at play every study when you're personally interviewing somebody they're going to want to please you right so they're going to they're going to try harder on those usability studies they're going to be nicer on their reviews because there's a person right there so you have to keep that into account when you do the research is it's not something you can eliminate completely there's also overconfidence bias uh I put this one because it's near and dear to me I have come in I've have developed something you know an interface let's say and I'm like this is the best interface this is earlier in my career I've learned and you know I had researchers say well let's let's try some other things and test and have some you know some comparative usability studies and I would develop another one and spend maybe less time on it and you know and then we'd present it and what I found was uh over and over ibean not not that I didn't learn the first time but we started doing this more and more after this first time is that users didn't necessarily agree with me I was overconfident in my abilities uh and that was a bias and then the ostrich effect so also hit this um where people don't want to deal with something it's uncomfortable they're not confrontational they feel like there's a confrontation there maybe or it's just you know it's just something they don't want to deal with so they just hide it so these are a couple biases just to be aware of um both when you're doing interviews but also when you're presenting to stakeholders too so both both cases um but I want to introduce the fact that if you're doing ux research or you have ux researchers they should be trained in recognizing bias disclosing bias and trying to reduce it as much as possible and the the reason is we want that data to be pure we want that data to be reliable and we we also need a ux team of researchers to um be trustworthy and if you're introducing a lot of bias you're now corroding trust with your stakeholders right so you have to be you know neutral party basically and remove that so that's my that's my bias slide all right thanks Andrew yeah so when we think about user experience uh we can think about that in terms of pillar uh how we can measure ux on really Six Dimensions so first being useful usefulness is that the user must be able to to to complete or fulfill a specific task uh and and purposefully intentionally uh the user experience has to be valuable has to provide value both to the user and the business um so if we're asking user to complete a task um how quickly can we move them through that task ask in the most positive way manner uh possible sorry uh it also should be desirable so the aesthetic should be should be pleasing um to the user uh the content should be findable so if we're asking them to click a button make sure that that button is using a specific label that we can derive from our research that is the the best possible label for that button uh and the content should also be scannable so easily uh easily scan by the user top to bottom left to right uh usable as well the you know intuitive interface Andrew's talked about interfaces a couple times today but it should be as usable as we can make it while also making it accessible so uh when we think about accessibility we have to think about users that might have assistive technology or or a physical disability where they they need reasonable accommodation so that would be uh you know thinking about compliance uh and and building our Solutions in a way that make them uh inclusive to all users so user experience myths what isn't ux uh so a lot of times we we hear oh you know it's only interfaces and and and Aesthetics and this is this couldn't be uh further from the truth so really the difference between a designer and a user experience designer is that a user experience designer is making decisions based on information on data um a a pure visual designer uh is using that information from ux to make informed decisions about how to design um another myth ux is all about usability um while usability is key to ux it isn't the only component of ux um and my my personal favorite myth ux research takes a long time Um this can be true if if practitioners are operating at academic levels or waterfall approach to research however uh it doesn't need to to take a long time um lean ux fits fits directly into an agile uh workflow or a Sprint um we've seen many projects here at service now completed in a matter of days with a very quick response from participants we're able to to take action on that very quickly so we've learned about ux what are our takeaways so with ux we we act and we think with empathy our users are at the center we research those user needs their their their requirements user requirements we're using data to make informed decisions about what we're going to build as a solution and then we also make sure that that works for everyone so I mentioned accessibility inclusive design we want it to work for everyone um then we're also continuously improving user experience design is not a set it and forget it solution um every time that we have every opportunity that we have to to go back and research is our solution working what can we approve upon um it's constant constant state of improvement so how do we create an effective ux process so first we have to think about Discovery so uh we we find what we're solutioning for uh then we research uh this is where we go into user user research collecting information about our users then we analyze that information so we can make informed decisions about what we're designing uh then we design our solution uh design and build U depending on on the solution um then we test make make sure that we're we're meeting all of our our benchmarks and then of course implementation and then the yellow arrow represents continuous Improvement so we can constantly be moving moving through a ux process so this is the visual representation of that but if we we Deep dive so understanding the problem that we're solving for we Define that in Discovery we do that with stakeholder meetings uh we do that with data that we currently have so if we think about like ticket volume um things of that nature then research uh creating and executing research plans uh to solve uh problems so the methods being card sorts user interviews usability studies uh surveys on platform and of course analytics so there's analytics available on platform that we can use to to gather that information then we analyze research reports C create customer Journey Maps uh user flows so looking for pattern PS in the research uh to provide insights into what will be a great user experience then of course we're designing that solution so research uh leads us to design where we develop that solution again customer Journey Maps user flows uh and then verifying information via testing uh user interviews usability uh studies surveys and analytics over time following that that process of continuous Improvement so now that we understand ux at a core level uh what's next uh Andrew you want to speak to evaluation on the platform yep and we had someone in the chat ask about this and uh kind of a Q&A kind of around what what is some platform capabilities um So within within the platform um there are your performance analytics you know these are going to get your uh Quant itative behavioral data user experience analytics is its own little module and you can Define custom events and this is really web analytics and you can also do you know funnels and different things to kind of track you know how people are using your portal in that case um but I think it also it also works for mobile and workspaces and things of that nature so you haven't checked out the user experience analytics that's one thing you know we have the performance analytics and then different areas have their own little analytics um such as the AI search there and so there's a lot of analytics right when I when I started and said hey you guys might might know um some things out there already uh you know lots of analytics lots of data lots of reports um there's also a survey tool in there um and I know EC Pro kind of came out with like an even uh bigger bigger survey deal where you can get it injected into your service and um so there's there's a lot of things around the quantitative right the quantitative area has a lot of different reports so if we move to the next slide you know I'm going to re resurface that uh that graph from earlier so it really depends on what you're after so you kind of look at your business problem and you look at the data you have and that should drive you know what what you need to do so you should have a lot of analytics to look at and figure out where some problems might be right but you could do you could do other items you could do the survey um once you've kind of determined maybe something out there or you're you could also use it as Discovery exploratory um you have you know qualitative items as well and the qualitative items aren't going to be something that's in the platform right you're that's something that is just done kind of um you know with with researchers so you can do the interviews interviews are great for processes I didn't really cover interviews much earlier um but I did mention that you don't just have to do interfaces so when I when I look at like a service blueprint or a customer Journey uh with a service blueprint which is what we did quite a lot of in my last last company um that's primarily through interviews so structured interviews again trying to remove the leading questions like my poll earlier and trying to really get to the truth of um you know how could this process improve how could the service improve um so if you're looking at that I'm going to point you in the interview if you're doing an interface usability study um is the number one choice right for getting a lot of Behavioral data and that's the other thing to keep in mind an interview is always going to be attitudinal right you can look though if you have a workflow you're going to have analytics so to see what that behavioral is so you're trying to come up with a holistic picture um to Data Drive those decisions and to Matt's point you know I'm mentioning oh there's all these studies they're options you don't do everything every for every problem so you may not um you know you don't have to spend a ton of time um you can do a usability study in two weeks um interviews same thing again field study is a little heavier because you you would actually travel to the location and spend um all day with your with your research um but you know that's kind of I wanted to cover like what is in the platform and what are the gaps that you may want to think about filling which is over here on the qualitative side all right and then this is an example of usability study I wanted to bring this in this is I did this for a customer here at service now um got their permission to use it and show other customers so here we are uh and to give you an idea of what a usability study is I think it's easier to to visualize so here I have patterns so I have strong patterns moderate and weak patterns it's based on how many participants said you know created a certain type of pattern and you you do that as a researcher you're looking at what they say and do and you're taking notes and then you're comparing across all of them and you're looking for those patterns as you go in this case I had two demographics so this was uh it actually was nine people tried to get 10 five in each demographic is roughly the number so you can see I can do success rate based on the demographic I can do time on task how long did it take them to finish a scenario because usability study is a bunch of scenarios so in this case I had five and I'm running all the participants through the same scenarios and I can track that especially with zoom when you get the permission to record I mean it's very easy to get your time on task and see that and then I also I mentioned earlier part of the job is empathizing and telling a story so taking those direct user quotes rather it coming from a a researcher or you know a subject matter expert if you actually get user quotes that come in um and actually tell helps tell the story and helps stakeholders empathize right and understand the problem so in this case their number one problem was two multiple portals and bouncing between the two um many other items and I listed them but this is a quick quick screenshot of just um an example study that we did all right thanks Andrew yeah so I mentioned accessibility earlier um so yeah a key a key tenant of ux is is accessibility um and the reason why is if we wait for users to report a failure so a user who's using a screen reader um they're they're unable to use an accordion in a in a knowledge based article to to view um expanded content because it doesn't interact with a keyboard I can't use that feature if we wait for the reported failure of that feature it can add months um to a process so if if we're on a a quarterly publishing cycle for our for our our work uh it might take two two two three uh Cycles to get that fixed so if we're testing ahead of time we can eliminate that entirely um so introducing accessibility um to testing and your development processes uh is is key um it's a key tenant of ux U that that should be a checkbox for your definition of done um we're we're testing against we're testing against section 508 um but the platform service now platform out of the box is both section 508 compliant and wacog 2.1a compliant so as we're working in the platform as we're making changes as we're introducing branding and colors uh knowledge-based content uh we need to continue testing as we've mentioned multiple times continuous Improvement always looking for areas of opportunity to make things better but most importantly if we think about accessibility it's just the right thing to do um all right so I'm going to pass the floor over to Eric he's going to show us some example work uh his work with service now customers Eric welcome okay yeah thank you very much you know it's fun to and interesting to hear you and Andrew talk about the different aspects of ux design as I mentioned I've been afforded the opportunity to spend time with our more Progressive customers over the years and for many years it was the unification of different service portals together you know that asking us how to do that to simplify things for their employees and then six years ago it was actually August 2018 is when customers also began to ask us if they could use service now to replace their traditional or Legacy internet portals as well um when I led the best employee portal contest it was evident from the very beginning that all of the finalists and all of the winners really emphasized user experience designed Research In some cases they had their own ux Professionals in house and they leveraged those people to conduct the workshops and the tests and the surveys and all those things in other cases they worked with our expert Services team um in some cases they brought in Partners who had those types of research but it reinforces the notion that to create a worldclass employee portal experience you have to do the ux research now vertex pharmaceutical is the one that you see here uh you can see the quote there from Kim Rose about really emphasizing ux research they used human Centric design thinking in their approach to designing their portals and then you can see the impact that that has had a 93% hrk deflection I mean that's really unheard of I've I've seen customers get to 80% but I've never seen one get to 93% and that means it's not not only designed well for the employees but it's also been promoted really well so employees always know where to go to selfs serve they also had 68% it incident deflection rate 92% it satisfaction scores and 8.5 million views since their launch this is a small company this is not a big company so making these portals um attractive and popular and also very useful where people can trust to the results is a key to getting those types of success metrics let's go to the next slide um here's another one this is rocket companies the people in the US would probably know them better as Rocket mortgage but they also own other businesses for example they own the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team um this was one that was actually led by the communications team so I have seen people in different roles whether there in it HR or even Communications recognize that there is a problem and want to do something about it and align the different stakeholder groups in this case uh this is their their new modern internet portal and they also did a lot of design work a lot of surveys with different groups of people that they categorized into different Persona groups and whatnot and the amazing thing about this is when they went live with their Rock world portal their self-service rate went up by 10x it actually was it was closer to 15x believe it or not and that was simply because they were unifying everything together so the same place where people began and started their day to get personalized news information and announcements was the same place that they would go to selfs serve to get answers from it and HR as well as services and support before this they had basically forgotten that there was an itsm portal might have learned about it during orientation and then they forgot about it so by unifying these things together and designing it with employees uh for employees can get you a huge value increase in your investment in the portal and service now let's go to the next one okay this was one of the very few winners that was actually a single departmental portal this is a large US Bank and uh what's interesting here is that this is their it portal it's using employee Center professional they also use us for HR and that happens to be a separate portal for now they are going to unify them together in the next year but the IT team really did emphasize user experience often I see it as the ones just to generalize here who don't care about user experience as much um a lot of times HR Communications understand the value and impact of ux designed research but in this case it really emphasized that they worked with their employees they're using the communications features of employee Center professional to attract a lot of people to their portal so this bank has about 100,000 employees they're getting about 43,000 average monthly visitors that's a lot more than you would expect from a portal that's just reactive uh and waiting for somebody to come and use it when they have a problem in that case you know they would only have employees coming there once or twice a year here they have almost half of their employee base coming every month and what that's done is it has allowed them to save their organization $2.4 million per year because the self-service rates again are going to be so much higher and they found out what services employees most often had issues with right that's part of ux design research looking at the analytics and feedback and they automated a lot of those services so now employees can come in here and they can run a self- diagnosis on their laptop and then they can run selfix scripts like restarting Citrix for example okay let's go to the next slide I think we have two more now Visa here one of our finalists uh they do they have their own in-house ux uh designers and researchers and they've really leveraged those people to create a few different phenomenal experiences uh what you see here is is a thumbnail of of a portion of their employee portal for HR um they also have a pre-hire portal a separate portal that they made just for pre hires to go through the onboarding process and they have done so much research that you can see the phenomenal statistics that they're getting there 99% of of new hires feel prepared on the first day and you can't really get better than that honestly not realistically um and over 99% feel valued as an employee this is true engagement and this is making sure that these designs are useful it's guiding people through the things that they need to do it's it's intuitive um it wasn't just some practitioner let's say an HR saying here's what I think people need no this was their ux researchers working with employees new hires to ask them what do you need right and then designing the portal experience to be intuitive and help them through all the different phases of these particular Journeys let's go to the last one here now before I talk about this one I just want to bring everybody's attention to a link I put in the chat a little while ago the link to in the chat is for the detailed report of the best employee portal contest it is a 32-page uh PDF full with lots of really practical ideas and best practices that all of these contest finalists went through um not just ux research but also how they promote their portals how they use feedback and analytics um how they structure their governance teams so multiple stakeholders can use the same experience for their employees uh this one here is is very striking and this is Paramount they actually replaced 20 different internet portals with this Murray portal when they launched it Murray is the middle name of the founder of Paramount uh they refer to it themselves as a consumer grade experience in bleeding edge design now they spent six months designing this before they even started talking to companies like service now and others to see who could actually help them fulfill their Vision ultimately they selected us because we can provide that hyper personalized experience and we have such a flexible UI um you can leave service now out of the box we do a lot of design research before we create our Baseline portal but you also have the ability to rearrange it to augment it to change the themes or in their case you know they started from scratch um but look at even the frequent actions widget it's made to look like a film strip that's very intentional for Paramount so you really do have a lot of flexibility with that UI and uh depending on what you aspire to deliver with your employees you can you can meet that aspiration uh with our technology okay all right thanks sir I'll turn it back over all right thanks so what what's next so uh we've learned about ux we've talked through research uh we've talked through accessibility um Eric shown us some great uh customer success stor so so what do we do now um so uh service now does have an accelerator as a part of impact uh a user experience accelerator um that you could leverage um there there's user experience courses on um the service now uh training site you can use your learning credits on now learning uh for that but of course uh from expert Services I'm predisposed to uh to to side there um but service now does have as part of expert Services uh full Suite of ux services that you can leverage and you can learn more about that on the uh service now expert Services Community um but uh that does take us to the end of our slide content now we're going to move to uh the Q&A section of our presentation um so Andrew have you been you've been monitoring that haven't you yeah we got a couple questions that I answered um we can open it up as well I could uh I guess I was told if I hit allow to talk you just have to unmute yourself so if you raise your hand I'll try Daniel here but if you raise your hand I can then I'll unmute you and then um you can ask your questions or you can type it in if you're if you want to do over the questions so I will I will cover um me some of the questions I have answered to just to highlight those for the recording um you know there aren't any tools inside service now that do research other than you know what was mentioned the surveys and the analytics so as far as doing time on task on usability studies and stuff um there are tools out there um constant debate on which one is best for and for which type of research even um but that is not in the platform that will be from the research team um you know someone mentioned that they're going to be doing um workflows and just starting with their journey I did mention that employees Center Pro which is his own license and it's what um what I primarily focus on does have the ability to insert surveys throughout a um service workflow life cycle that came out in February of this year again it's a license though so if you don't have that um and or even if you do honestly the other thing to look at your workflows and often your services is a customer Journey map which is usually built off a series of research um could be a lot of interviews interviews is kind of the staple could be um design thinking sessions which are somewhat like a focus group but there's design thinking you could bring in for that as well and then I often like in my in a p past life I liked bringing a service blueprint if you're familiar with service Blueprints and the the stages of delivering a service and I like to line that up with a customer Journey map up top so you you got what the user sees and what makes them where they're finding their frustration and then you can look below the surface at what happens in the service at that time and what what is causing that pain point or a combination of things and then you know how to you know where to focus your effort to fix that um that issue so that's a couple questions that have come in we have a hand raised from Antonio and have to un to verbalize your question and the mute button or unmute button should be in the lower left corner of your Zoom yep I see the mute button coming off and on so it's on right now and interrupt me don't go if you but I think folks are enabled to folks are unable to talk uh I was also asked about oh we got some questions coming in here too um so I think this one is for you Eric when will the PDF report of the portal contest come out oh uh yes if you scroll back through the chat you will see that I put a link in there in fact I'll just put it back in the chat again the detailed report for the best employee portal contest is out you can access it you can download it and I'm just going to go ahead and and put that link back into the chat here so everybody has it um this should be a very useful report for every customer who aspires to deliver a phenomenal employee experience if you plan to compete in the 2025 best employe portal contest then I would highly recommend that you read about all of the different things last year's winners did and try to incorporate some of those right and then another question I think for you Eric is um are the examples you given built on Portal or employee Center or both yeah great question I was wondering if this might come up so the truth is um every portal on service now is built using the service portal technology framework and you cannot look at the user interface um of a portal and determine well what entitlements did this customer have not necessarily um I think of employee Center professional not as a portal per se but as a suite of functionality that helps you bring the portal to life in order to populate it it's things like content publishing for authoring and targeting and scheduling content it's campaigns for those Omni Channel multi multiphase informational campaigns it's app launcher so you can give them single sign on access to the applications they're entitled to it's it's approvals Hub so you can aggregate approvals from many different systems and present them to take action on them in service now um but just looking at a portal you can't really tell so even Paramount they created a new portal I think every widget they created was probably ones they created themselves new widgets um but they're populating a lot of their news and other things like that using the features of employee Center professional as well as audiences for that personalization so um there are right ways and wrong ways to let's say customize the portal we actually go into that in the additional resources of that report in that link um but the truth is you can have out of the-box widgets great you can change a lot about them using CSS uh for example and you can rearrange them and and and all these different things using service portal configuration the only time you get in trouble is when you actually modify the code of an existing widget in which case then if service Now updates it later on you may have to evaluate a conflict during your upgrade but the compromise there is that you can clone a widget and make the changes you want to your copy of it and service now will still continue to update the original uh and then you can always revert back to the original if you like something that we've done so there are right ways uh to to create a tailored custom experience um and then there's there's wrong ways and any new widget you create is always safe because service now will never touch some new widget that you you create for yourselves yeah and then our our end on Expert Services you know we focus primarily on EC and EC Pro a portal is still out there and the other thing is it's you know Port the employee Center is built on top of service portal so they're kind of very similar or like intermixed right so employee Center just adds adds more on top all right uh got another question about sample questions for focus groups so focus groups and interviews usability studies you're going to build that around what are you trying to solve so the first thing you want to sit back and say what is the problem we're trying to solve and then you're going to build them around that so there might be examples to take inspiration off of uh we can look for out out there in the wild but um you're going to tailor that uh specifically to that problem so hopefully that that helps there um so is EC Pro includ itm Pro uh I don't believe so we're not licensing it comes with I believe some hrsd license uh or it's a standalone right now that's that's I think how that is but probably consult your licensing expert on your account all right um any other questions all right if not we can go to the last poll um the poll doesn't allow a free form text so I'd really love it is if you don't if if you have more ideas than these three um please put in the chat we'd like to capture that we'd like to figure out what we want you know you are users for the webinar and we want to know what you guys want and we want to tailor uh to you guys so please use the chat if these these three examples you have another idea um to put in there and Matt mentioned in the beginning there will be a survey that comes out in the end um definitely helpful if you fill out the survey you know we're all about data driving things so the survey will also help us um you know figure out what what next steps what you guys want to hear about you know if you want examples Etc and it does seem like examples is the highest but pretty pretty good distribution there and next highest is how to conduct user user research okay all right and that brings us to the end of our user experience uh webinar today so thanks to everyone that joined and as we mentioned please please um complete that end survey we'll also be publishing the presentation to a recorded uh version of the presentation to the Community page please keep a lookout for that so thanks everyone goodbye yep thank you thank you Eric thank you [Music] Andrew yep thanks Matt excellent