Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it at work.
Hi! Designer at ServiceNow. Would love to know a bit more about what you’re going through. Specifically what products you’re having a hard time with and maybe a perspective on what we could do to improve. I’d be more than happy to take it back to the team(s).
Not the previous poster but my experience of ServiceNow is:
It’s slow.
It’s rarely clear which button you need to advance a workflow.
Some buttons take irreversible actions, others lead to further information, and these two types of buttons look identical.
The point about a confusing underlying information architecture is spot-on.
Pages can have multiple tabbed sections which is disorienting.
The approval interface makes it very unclear what you are approving without looking it up elsewhere yourself.
You have to right click on a column header to find the export to Excel option?
Asterisk apparently means ‘contains’ when searching, unlike search syntax in any other product.
No apparent way to search all fields in a list - you have to choose which field specifically to search in.
URLs are long and ugly.
Users are displayed as FirstName LastName, which is friendly and all but there is no way to disambiguate when two users share the same name but have a different User ID - and clashes like these happen all the time in my company of >100k employees.
I’ve no idea how much of this is fundamental to the product and how much is the fault of our configuration. There may be useful features of which I am unaware, but the UI does not invite discovery of these if they are there.
Thanks for sharing your experience. We (designers) don’t often get to hear feedback like this first hand in an unguided conversation. So I really value it.
Your points are super valid, and your last sentence resonates with me heavily. It’s the essence of what my team is focused on improving. Our out-of-box should be as close to ‘great’ as possible. This goes for the most technical implementors, admins, devs... all the way down to non-technical single-app users. A great platform will know how to do this gracefully without forcing the latter through the same experience.
Going to bring these, as well as the other points in the thread, up in my staff meeting next week. It’s relevant to the work we’re currently doing.
Background: I work at a company where engineers use JIRA and support uses service now.
I find basic tasks challenging in your app. A support agent escalates to developers (i.e. me). "Hey, can you look at INC123456". The ticket is not yet assigned to me. How do I find and open this ticket? The support agent can send me a direct link, but there's no apparent relation between any of the query params and the ticket number, and also no obvious UI element in which I can put a ticket number and navigate there. When I navigate to the ticket, comments are mixed in with audit entries. The frame based navigation also means I get questions from junior devs on tickets and they copy links into slack messages that just send me to the homepage.
Thanks Macha. Hearing a specific case of pain points is very helpful. I am bummed that things as (seemingly) simple as referencing records, and wayfinding is a hard thing to do in a 2020 interface. It’s the most fundamental thing you can do in our platform, and should theoretically be the easiest.
Definitely going to bring this into my discussion with other design leaders next week.
Top right is a settings gear and help icon for me, no search box. The only search box on the homepage is "filter navigator" which filters the left nav.
Thanks for speaking up, and for personally caring about your product. But many (most?) of us have concluded that providing feedback at this level tends to have no observable impact.
Seems like all tools in this space (IT service management) are terrible.
At work I have to use HP Service Manager. Just thinking of it makes me nervous. Made for bureaucreats by bureaucreats!
Same. We have it at my job (at a very large healthcare org) and I will do almost anything to avoid using it. It's so bad that there are people who avoid it entirely, preferring to use their own instance of some other tracker, who then have an assistant whose FULL TIME JOB is to copy stuff back and forth between the two.
Every time I complain about ServiceNow someone pops up saying "You're just not configuring it correctly". A service that relies on the user to configure properly (or rather, have an in-house expert) is not a good service.
I think ServiceNow is just a form builder with drag and drop. It's ultimately your company that is creating the horrible forms and wizards that they force you to use.
I have nightmares about ServiceNow from my banking days. Requesting anything via it was like trying to solve a weird puzzle - you need to fill every cryptic field in just right, or `computer says "no"`!
It’s a super competitive industry so everyone is bloating their product trying to shove as many features as they can in without thinking how that affects performance. AI/ML is public enemy number one here.
Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it at work.