we live in a user-centric world where the expectation of a personalized delightful and powerful app is the norm creating a world-class app is no longer just about functionality it's about delivering that functionality across the entirety of the user experience it's pivotal that custom applications not only effectively do their job but also provide a consumer-grade multi-channel experience that is both a joy to use and consistent within the context the app is leveraged app engine provides a platform to address these opportunities and deliver cross-enterprise experiences users love in this three-part video series we'll take a look at how app engine's unique platform approach to low-code development can help you build cross enterprise apps fast deliver experiences your end users will love and scale apps without sprawl in this second session the focus is all about the end user experience a massive aspect of the delight and users experience with applications is delivering what they want when they need it whether they need to get support during an urgent time of need or simply complete a routine activity associated with their role the aim of a thoughtful app is to minimize the steps necessary to achieve a desired outcome app engine simplifies this goal by harnessing the power of the now platform the definitive platform of platforms for digital workflows we provide unrivaled capabilities to connect and automate business process using our single platform approach along with unique capabilities such as integration hub which simplifies connectivity to external systems we make the complex seem simple to end users by providing streamlined workflows powered by tools like flow designer and process automation designer which are easy to incorporate into your apps a process that could traditionally require the user to complete a dozen independent activities like submitting forms requesting approval and updating systems of record could be evolved into an app that allows the user to take action once and then lets the automated process behind the scenes take care of the rest these features are unique in the industry while other vendors have tools to build pretty uis they often can't natively provide any integration capabilities they'll usually rely on fragmented tool chains to provide deeper functionality like artificial intelligence or insights leading to yet another information system silo and broken end user experiences with servicenow's single platform approach these concerns are a non-issue built on the now platform your apps also have the ability to harness advanced capabilities like analytics and aiml-powered decision-making to further enhance the end user experience it's important that these solutions be available to users when and where they need them providing capabilities that enable self-service this means whether the user accesses the app via mobile web or engaging a virtual agent chat bot the experience needs to remain capable and consistent not only that but ideally applications should maintain a degree of consistency across use cases enabling the end user to accomplish their goals without having to remember the nuances of a variety of different apps without that degree of consistency you risk disrupting end user adoption and delaying app rollout due to the need for extra training and support we can see here that a portal experience for one app will provide a very similar look and feel to other apps created with app engine the same experiential consistency can be achieved with all now platform experiences such as workspaces and mobile apps with app engine you can leverage servicenow quality experiences for any of these engagement channels out of the box or customize them to fit seamlessly into your business our tools like ui builder make it easy to achieve this level of polish using our branding and theming options you can ensure consistency and end user familiarity finally we must never lose track of the purpose of these app experiences to support knowledge worker productivity app engine allows you to unlock the full power of the now platform the same feature set we use to develop servicenow products to enable this outcome using app engine you can easily pull in contacts from other information systems both in and outside the now platform and seamlessly integrate that context into aspects of the app this allows you to put everything the user needs at their fingertips no need for them to dig through emails or log into different systems to find information necessary to complete an activity tools like performance analytics ensure that the data flowing in and out of your apps is not lost rather retained in a manner that can be used to improve process and ultimately drive business decisions new innovations like ai search enhance seemingly simple app features like the search bar and allow you to provide context sensitive actionable results that will improve over time with the use of machine learning ai on the now platform goes far beyond search though we give you the ability to provide ai assisted recommendations via our virtual agent chat bot auto assign engineers to appropriate cases respond automatically to incidents and more other platform capabilities such as predictive intelligence also allow you to harness the power of ai to fuel automated decision making that can speed time to outcomes there's so much that goes into creating a world-class app experience that end users love but it's easy to see how app engine gives you access to the tools you need to accomplish this goal what's more is that these experiences will continue to evolve over time given that they are literally using the underlying innovation powering servicenow keeping your apps impactful and relevant the examples we just went through are just a few ways app engine helps you create unified first class experiences for everyone provide intelligent self-service capabilities and empower knowledge worker productivity be sure to check out the official creator workflows and app engine pages to learn more