ServiceNow Service Portal
What Is It And Why Does Your Business Need It?
Your ServiceNow instance is loaded with rich data and innovative workflows (way to go!), but for those who are not well versed in the platform, your instance can look like a foreign language. So how can employees or customers leverage the data in your platform without breaking out Rosetta Stone or getting an IT degree? Introducing the ServiceNow Service Portal.
What Is The ServiceNow Service Portal?
ServiceNow Service Portal is a front-end portal framework that allows enterprises to build self-service experiences for their customers and employees. Leveraging data from your ServiceNow instance, Service Portal offers users an easy-to-use interface where users can access specific platform features and applications of ServiceNow. Think of it like a website that is easy to use and shields your end-users from the behind-the-scenes technical infrastructure.
With an easy-to-use drag-and-drop designer, Service Portals can be configured by both expert developers and beginners.
Introduction
ServicePortal in ServiceNow
Why Should Your Business Use The ServiceNow Service Portal?
Service Portals are excellent tools for helping to manage human resources at a large enterprise. Consider that you are already leveraging ServiceNow HR Delivery to support various employee needs like PTO requests, onboarding, and knowledge management, but have not yet implemented an employee Service Portal.
In order to complete a simple task, like enrolling in employee benefits, the most direct solution would be for your employee to input their data into your enterprise’s ServiceNow instance themselves. This might be a fine solution for a ServiceNow specialist, but allowing every employee to enter their data would be an administrative nightmare. Something could easily go wrong and the vast majority of your staff wouldn’t know where to begin in order to solve the issue or support the employee who made a request.
Instead, you have employees fill out a third-party form and have your HR team manually insert the data into your instance. This is an improvement over the first scenario, but honestly, we’re still in the night terror arena. What if your employee has a clarifying question? There’s nowhere to ask or find out on your form, so now your HR representatives are inundated with emails.
Your company needs a solution where the employee has full control over their data and does the majority of the heavy lifting, but the registration process is relatively painless. ServiceNow Service Portal saves the day. You can create a custom, beautifully branded, and intuitively designed user interface that easily walks your employee through a self-service enrollment experience. If a question pop-ups, they can easily access the Knowledge Base you’ve put together (nice job) and find what they’re looking for without using human resources.
The Benefits Of Service Portal
With a clean design and modern features, ServiceNow Service Portal can increase workplace productivity and employee engagement by delivering your ServiceNow applications in an easy-to-use platform.
With ServiceNow Service Portal You Can:
Create engaging
app experiences
to increase user adoption, productivity, and satisfaction
Quickly and easily
create application
experiences with no-code, drag-and-drop development tools
Empower users to request
catalog items
by direct submission or via a shopping cart experience
ServiceNow Service Portal Tools & Features
Drag & Drop Designer
With the Drag-and-Drop designer, any administrator, whether they are a pro developer or no-code builder, can easily design robust, user-friendly Service Portals. The ready-to-use components integrate with the Now Platform for a consistent user experience.
Widgets
Service Portal widgets provide the functionality for your ServiceNow Service Portal pages. You can use the out-of-the-box widgets provided by ServiceNow, clone and modify widgets, or develop custom widgets to fit your enterprise’s unique needs. Within your widget, you can use HTML templates, CSS, client scripts, server scripts, and any JavaScript dependencies.
GlideFast On Air
Top Ways To Enhance ServiceNow Catalog Forms With Widgets
Single-Page View
Service Portal's model‑view‑controller paradigm lets you build everything as a single‑page application with less dependency on application business logic.
Cross-Device Compatibility
As Service Portal is mobile-friendly, users can access your portal on any device from anywhere, whether it be in the office or in the field. Service Portal also seamlessly integrates with the ServiceNow Mobile App.
Faceted Search
Help users quickly find what they are looking for in the Service Portal with the configurable and dynamic faceted search feature.
Guided Tour Designer Integration
With the Guided Tour Designer, you can create and create and customize guided tours for any Service Portal page. Guided tours help train and onboard users within the Service Portal, walking them through a series of interactive steps to navigate through your portal.
Overview
How To Use ServiceNow Guided Tour Designer
Automated Test Framework Integration
ServiceNow Automated Test Framework allows users to create and run automated tests to ensure an instance works after implementing a change. With this integration, you can set up tests to check applications and user experiences in your Service Portal, before publishing.
Virtual Agent Integration
Deliver a comprehensive service experience with a single Virtual Agent configuration that can span your entire Service portal or multiple portals.
How To Design Outstanding Service Portals In ServiceNow
While anyone, regardless of their developer experience, can build a Service Portal in ServiceNow, there are some tricks of the trade when it comes to designing Service Portals that are truly beautiful and functional.
The Benefits Of Thoughtful Service Portal Design
The functionality of your Service Portal is important, but the bells and whistles matter, too. Good design takes your portal to the next level. It’s an opportunity to draw on your company’s unique branding and culture and build a connection with your users.
Increase user
adoption
by building a service portal with a trust-worthy User Interface
Easily communicate
useful information
to users in a way they can
easily digest
Solve problems that
will reduce call rates
and troubleshooting ours and streamline organizational processes
1
Design For Your User
As the Service Portal designer, you work very closely with the data and inner workings of your instance. But your user is likely approaching this information for the first time. Be sure to design your service portal for the user, not yourself.
How To Design for Non-Technical Users
-
Avoid the jargon – Change the names of lists of sections of your portal to reflect a user’s natural language and way of thinking
-
Minimize choices – Help users make quick decisions by limiting the number of options presented at one time
-
Create multiple paths – Clearly show multiple ways for users to access material
How To Design For Accessibility
-
Contrast - Assist visually-impaired users with clear color contrast ratios
-
Visual Hierarchy - Ensure the most important information stands out, and essential navigational elements are not hidden
-
Tag and Code - Ensure your images have in-code descriptions and tags for use by screen readers
2
Design Mobile First
Start your custom Service Portal build by creating your portal for mobile-first. It’s far easier to scale your portal design up, from a small, mobile screen format to a large screen, rather than to scale down.
How To Design For Mobile
-
Touch-friendly size – Ensure links, buttons, and form fields are of an appropriate size to be selected and manipulated by touch
-
Cut the clutter – Cut out unnecessary borders, spacing, and information to ensure optimal use of limited space
-
Keep it consistent – Ensure the experience from the smallest phones to the largest monitors is consistent. Tabbed content on desktop should still be tabbed content on a cell phone
-
Flexbox – Great assistance with positioning elements because centering is hard
3
Strive For A Unified Design
Make your Service Portal shine by delivering a consistently-branded user experience.
How To Create A Cohesive Portal
-
Use a Brand or Style Guide – A brand guide contains many of the styles an organization uses, which can simply design decisions
-
Use Theme CSS – Use Theme CSS to set up styles you will repeatedly use throughout the portal, such as buttons, links, headings, even panels
-
SCSS Variables – SCSS variables keep you from having to repeatedly look up the hex code for a color. ServiceNow uses many variables that can be overridden on the portal record
-
Style Consistently – Panels, buttons, headings, links, and other elements should present the same throughout the site
4
Guide Your Users On Their Journey With Clear UI/UX
Guide your user’s eye and their navigation through your portal with these design tools:
Portal Guidance Tools
-
Whitespace – Give your user’s eyes time to rest, allow them to gravitate toward that content you want them to see
-
Typography – Correct use of typeface, weight, color, and pairing can assist the visual hierarchy you seek to create for your users
-
Images and Icons – Visual indicators and communication can help establish a sense of where the user is, as well as help them find where they’re going
-
Interactive Elements – Hover states and micro animations help a user confirm what action they can take
For a comprehensive and visual explanation of each of the above concepts, explore this GlideFast On Air session.
Plus, explore this full guide of resources to help you tackle common Service Portal design challenges:
Implementation Services For ServiceNow Service Portal
Are you ready to offer your employees and customers a beautiful and intuitive user experience? Whether you’re already leveraging ServiceNow Service Portals or would like to get started, our team of expert designers, developers, and architects are here to help.
At GlideFast Consulting, we know that no two Service Portals are the same. We work closely with our clients to ensure we’re building custom Service Portals that address their unique needs, reinforce their brand and culture, and deliver an exceptional user experience that will increase user adoption.
THE DESIGNED EXPERIENCE
Visit GlideHits, our portfolio of Designed Experiences, to see what is possible.
Learn how a Designed Experience can elevate your ServiceNow plans.