In order to solve the challenges at hand, first we started to interview users across multiple GE businesses to understand how they interacted with ServiceNow.
We asked them to show us as we recorded the sessions in order to analyze and get a sense of what common issues they were experiencing. We grouped our users into personas so we could catalog the type of work they did and issues that they were facing.
As we worked on improving the overall navigation, we started to work on developing a new look that would align better with GE’s branding guides. Using Illustrator and Sketch I developed a mix of low-fi wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes. The UX team worked alongside our development team to figure out which ones were better suited for our upgrades.
Eventually found a compromise between what the users needed and what our development team could do.
Once we made changes to the platform and released them to the public, we tried to build rapport with our users. In order to do so, we leveraged a platform named BrightIdea. This platform allowed us to receive feature suggestions directly from the users. Users then would vote the ideas they felt were the most important to them.
Using agile methodology, we worked in 2 week sprints to implement the best ideas. We iterated the user interface as we discovered pain points and opportunities. To this day, there is an ongoing process to make the tool better and to be able to automate certain aspects. During our research we also discovered that there were knowledge gaps that our user base had regarding the capabilities of ServiceNow.To solve this, I developed more than 50 videos of training materials to reduce the learning curve of this robust tool.
The ServiceNow upgrade and redesign has been a success in many ways. We have been able to cut upgrading time to a new instance from 6-8 months to 2-3 weeks.
Adding features can be done within one or two sprints instead of months. Visually, ServiceNow looks a lot more polished and the users have adopted the new UI very well. We kept open channels of communication with our user base to adjust on the system on the fly.
