welcome to glad chat episode four on service portal i am sarah tolson a senior technical consultant with glad fast consulting and this is my co-host co-conspirator introduce yourself megan hi i'm megan ahrens i am a technical consultant at glidefast i have been working with servicenow for about five years now probably a little more actually i've touched a bunch of the platform including service portal i'm excited to talk about it today all right well let's jump in so megan what do you like about service portal like what draws you to it honestly i i like the freedom of it you know like you're kind of you're kind of stuck to in the back end of service now you're stuck to kind of a certain way of doing things right now the list right and and sometimes it's just not everything everyone needs right like they need a little bit more you can you have the flexibility to build that in the service portal and and to build a really good user experience and i think that it's fun you know oh yeah oh yeah same here like with the uh with a platform you have like the list and the form and what have you i think i was talking on mute because i'm really talented like that um but i was agreeing with you and i agree the the freedom to create this totally unique experience that really just speaks to the culture and the branding of a certain company or organization it's a lot of fun it it really is a lot of fun to just cater to the people that are doing the good work at whatever company that we happen to be working with and just helping make their lives easier i i love knowing that i'm making somebody's life easier when i get to put that portal together you know oh yeah yeah yeah that's awesome so um what's been your favorite project so far let's see that's a hard question that's that's a tough call because like my very first project it was one of glyphosate's very first hr portal so it was terrifying but the people that worked there were just so nice and they were so easy to work with and i i just i just loved them they were really good clients to work with and they were really happy with the portal we built them and everything so that was a lot of fun but uh i would have to say the project that has been my favorite this far was working with the department of tennessee the design that actually you and i and lauren toomey another one of our portal developers put together i just loved the transformation the the feedback was amazing when we first started some of our first initial mock-ups what what what did he say that it looked prison-ish or something like that but then when we were done all their feedback they were like you knocked it out of the park and we really did like that was such a great design to put together and you felt really good about it because you know this is going to help some of the most vulnerable people in the state of tennessee and coming from a local government background that that just made me so happy to to put that together i'd definitely say that that one's one of my favorites yeah state of tennessee would probably be one of my favorites as well i like it because it was a very different approach to what i would say any other service portal that we've done oh yeah was because you know it was a csp portal you you really had to make it more like human friendly you know yeah which was a little different than you know you're doing your normal itsm it portals which was cool it was interesting completely different audience there the the general public versus like an internal audience that already knows your workflows and your processes with the company and all that it was it's really interesting the difference that you get between like a csm project and an itsm project and then hr is a whole in the like the esc portal they're they're like a whole another beast that you have to develop for you're finding out right now uh my very first project is new service portal project and it's a little bit of a beast yeah i've seen what they want to do though you're going to have a lot of fun on that project it's it's going to be really awesome to see what you come up with there yeah yeah i'll be bugging you for a help so that's cool sarah where do you think that service portal will be going well we've this this uh platform you know funnily enough i was looking through the going through the historic blog articles on codecreative.io the other night and going back how far to before service portal and seeing how far we've come through the years and everything and with a new ux framework i know that surface portal is trying to encourage people our servicenow rather is trying to encourage people to go to that to the new framework and everything which isn't isn't quite ready to replace service portal well there is there are some updates coming for the esc in the next release that we've seen which will be really exciting very intuitive very clean but they are starting to look at sun setting service portal as the focus for their for their ui however i i really can't tell you at this point whether or not i'm sure they'll get there but right now the now experience framework just isn't there to really replace the self-service side of things which is fine because i don't know about you but i need a little more time to get used to that new framework and get it get my head around it and everything because it's so different from service world i mean it's gorgeous and i see the intent and see where they were going and everything but i think service portal is going to be around for a little while longer you know and that'll give us more time to uh tool around and make those really custom really gorgeous user experiences that we love to put together right so speaking of gorgeous service portals i get a lot of questions about the value of design you know because a lot of projects are like oh we just won out a box we just wanted a box and then they see the screenshots of the work that glide fast portal team has done and they're like oh but how much does that cost you know and uh so what value have you seen what impact have you seen design have in your different projects well if you take a look at the out of box service portal there you know it's usable it's definitely usable but in my opinion not very intuitive and i think that when you go into things and and you design things for a user you can go and theme it all you want but even just like moving a couple of widgets around from different pages to the home page makes it so much more intuitive it makes it easier to use and i i think that clients are at the end of the day way happier with something you know beautiful but also super usable too oh yeah one and it makes me laugh sometimes when people are like oh don't focus on the front end as much i'm like ah i think that uh i think that they're almost even so i mean and this this is something i often say like a site can be gorgeous but if it doesn't work it doesn't matter how pretty it is it's just art you know let's appreciate it great but it's not helping me get my job done there there is this balance like you said between the functional and design the other side of that is that studies have shown if the site doesn't look good users are less likely to trust it which means they're less likely to adopt and a lot of the roi that people see in their service now implementations comes from that that self-service component where people are going through the portal and not tying up their i.t department or their hr department with in-person requests or phone requests or what have you so so a lot of that goes into that whole decision to adopt and use the portal i think yeah i definitely agree mm-hmm yeah all right all right so if you could do if you could work do a portal for anybody in the whole wide world who would it be yes gosh it's going to take me a while to think about it you go first i would probably say two things i would die i'm originally from the raleigh area north carolina and with my background local government i would die to do a service portal and especially a front-facing citizen service portal for the city of raleigh i think that would be so freaking awesome that would be a lot of fun or really any of the cities and towns that i've grown up with here in uh central north carolina i think that would be a lot of fun that would be a good start for me do you think of anybody no i i don't know if i have one honestly i just i want to build out something super cool super helpful but i don't have anybody in mind that can let me take it on you know like if we were to do work for disney or okay since i'm a major nerd i i think of like wizards of the coast i want to make a dnd themed service portal for the employees there yes because you know everybody that works there has to be a certain level of nerd like it's got to be in the application process somewhere so yeah i think that would be a really fun one to uh put together as well like a really cute star wars theme that would be absolutely okay absolutely good lord with everything that disney owns now you could go a lot of different directions with that whether it's like classic disney or star wars or avengers or whatever yeah definitely i didn't even think that i wasn't even thinking commercial i guess oh yeah yeah commercial is harder for me to think of because you know there's so many brands that that like are so much a part of our our household their household names that you don't even think oh that's a company that might need automation and workflows and service portal and stuff like that so uh it is kind of hard to think of it like that but we've had a lot of good clients come in a lot of big names that have been a lot of fun to work with things like that so it's kind of like whatever they bring in i'm i'm fine to do it it's a lot of fun to work with a lot of these larger companies so let's see do you have any service portal horror stories to share service portal horror stories well i'm sure that um redacting names to protect the guilty of course i'll be the guilty because when service portal came out yeah back back in my day i'm just kidding in a day um i was like put on a proof of concept and it was painfully new very very new uh was this like helsinki new or yeah like helsinki knew oh it was rough um and because i i had some angular experience and by experience i i mean like i had like a week long wait they were like you're perfect for this oh you can totally do angular that's all you need i was like okay cool let's do this so long story short a lot i could not figure out how to get um like widgets when you clicked a button to take me to another page and so i built like a bunch of wire frames i'm not wire not wireframes i'm sorry iframes i bunch i built a bunch of iframes and put them in modals because i knew how to call immodal wow so bad it was so funny and and it's hilarious to me now because i couldn't i couldn't even figure out how to print some things on the page sometimes like i was like it's not working where i was then and where i am now is like so much better like it's so crazy and documentation has gotten much better as well oh yeah oh yeah definitely what about you we we've had we've had well i i came in later i've been on the platform since h a j k l uh london maybe wow yeah like i i i did a lot of freelance design freelance websites and stuff like that before the platform so i brought that knowledge in uh with me onto the platform so by time i got here there was a lot of the documentation and best practices and the old guard as you well had already like dissected it and tore it apart and put it back together and said this is how you do it and of course i was trained by somebody who has been on servicenow since cheater forever yeah it's been great having him as a resource and everything so he's been able to teach me a lot of the best practices and things like that to get me started but even being off the platform i still watched his work and you know looked over his shoulder and was like uh you need to like add some more padding or something because that does not look good but uh watching the platform evolve like service portal initially came out i think in geneva but it like crashed it was not ready for go live or anything so they like had to almost entirely reboot it and rewrite it in helsinki from what i understand and uh so you you were doing that like right at the beginning of like yeah yeah and and the capabilities that we have access to and stuff like that have only grown since then so uh yeah i i kind of got lucky coming in when i did because like all the all the pain all the like um what do you call them when you're like getting used to things and growing pains growing pains all the growing pains that happen now so they were like good and everything and then uh when i i'm sitting at a desk at city hall and i see what my husband does for a living i'm like oh my gosh like this would revolutionize government and so that got me real interested in it and it has the the csm the csm application's been revolutionary for our government clients and all that so that's been a lot of fun so what are you working on right now keeping the client names out of it of course what different things are you doing well right now me and you both are building out a asset search and claim widget in the service portal yeah that's been fun it's been a little challenging definitely um i think that first of all it's one one main widget right and me and you are both trying to work on it together i think we are even typing comments back and forth to each other when we go into it yeah that's been fun it cracks me up like i think my most recent comment in there was like please make me pretty sarah please if you found that one yet i don't know where i found that one i'll have to go look for it it's an html so we are building a searching claim so there are a bunch of assets out that i guess don't have an owner right yeah they have to they have to claim them and say okay we know what this is that's on our system it's not some hacker trying to like get up all in all our business so it's good but we're building in like it's like it's a list widget it's the same as like a simple list widget but we're adding in like the ability to filter the list and to export the list and a lot of the things you see with like the typical data table widget we had to add in a lot of extra extra actions and we wanted to put it in a user interface that worked better for the people that were working with it because the data table is good for showing a huge amount of data but not necessarily working that data in this case so right so i mean i think they needed to show like seven or eight fields on it and then also be able to claim it on the same row it just was very hard to read um it was one of those instances where it was better to create custom in our opinion than to go and customize the out of box data table widget and i'll tell you what the client did make it easy because they're like here's like a whole website with our branding stuff in it and we're like oh so i don't even think about what this looks like i just have to like do to do so uh and like pro tip for anybody out there that's looking at using us here at glidefast to build out a service portal if you can give us your brand assets a uh style guide the photography that you want to see or whatever images and icon sets and stuff like that that makes it so much easier just to get going to know what direction we're going to take your implementation and things like that it does make it a lot easier and i guess that can lead into another question if you could advise future clients as to what you need to help make their service portal implementation a success and make it a smooth process what would you ask them to do what would you say would help them help them help you well definitely like the like you said style i want their style sheets if possible we definitely want to go over processes and the type of users that will be using the portal right so that we can tailor it to them what do and you know like um someone was asking me recently how do we design for the user right and like you can send out surveys and stuff beforehand and like what would you like to see in this portal and not that we're going to do it everything right but it gives us a better idea of what they need so that we can build build it to the best of our abilities and make it usable and pretty too oh yeah i definitely i definitely have to agree and encourage taking the extra time maybe if you ever extra hours in workshop or filling out extra questionnaires so we kind of have a better sense of who your users are and what they want it does go a long way to make sure that we cover all our bases and we're not getting to go live and you get then the client's like oh no you forgot this thing and we must have it and right you know then change orders and you know it's it can be a mess it's better to give us as much information and everything up front so we can it actually contracts the amount of time we spend overall if we don't have to go back and rework or have to go back and restyle or we have your branding team your marketing team on board from the start so that the service portal is aligning with whatever other sites or whatever they want it to align with so yeah and if you don't like it give us constructive feedback that's always good right yeah though i i don't think i will ever top that looks pretty prison-ish that was hilarious you know we were going for simple they didn't want simple they wanted friendly they wanted friendly and they wanted colors and i never get to do colors because a lot of the service portals we built it's like very yeah i was like oh i could do some colors now let me pull out my pantone books and we'll go to town buddy so uh yeah can i find some accent colors in their original site i'm like using that yep yep yep but i have like it's amazing what you can do with one color because if i've had some clients give me one color and make a website and in fact the glide fast the demo side i've built up for uh fast gov is one color um yeah yeah it's but it's like five different shades of blue that's an interesting thing that's not something that i would even think of as like oh they're giving you one color but you can shade it however you want exactly exactly and you can use the background colors there's a lot you can do with one color to create accents and to create a sense of space and also to uh create like different content areas so you can limit the content or you can like help the user zero in on different types of content at one time and it'd not be like overwhelming to them and everything right right and that that portal is beautiful so oh i i'm very proud of it it was a lot of fun and and i'm more i did some of the al the artwork on my own time because i just so cool it was so fun i loved it and of course i having worked in city hall would be the one that would nerd out over like drawing a picture of a garbage truck because the garbage truck is beautiful like you said to me and i was like i didn't know that i would ever love a garbage truck yep oh but it is actually a recycled truck because it was kind of a homage because some of my favorite people when i worked at city hall were the guys that drove the recycle truck like they come into my office every day before they went out on the route to collect like hour or once a week to collect our recycling it was always hey how you doing and they're the ones i kept the candy jar on my desk for and everything it's just real sweet guys that just loved to death but yeah so will we are about at our time any closing thoughts regarding your work in service portal because i know you don't totally focus you do you know as service portal developers we do like all the things okay just just not everybody is comfortable with the front end parts so we those of us that are do that but any parting words regarding service portal and your experience as a service portal developer on the platform you know the people that are afraid of it don't be i mean it's really just a lot like the back end scripting as well don't be scared i see i'm scared of the back-end scripting i'm like uh it's very like um yeah don't be afraid of it and you know if you need help with making things pretty uh reach out to sarah oh we've got a number of people on staff that are very talented when it comes to the front end design and everything and whatever you may need if you have questions about it you're a developer feel free to reach out to us or if you're a client and you want to see your employees supported with a world-class experience please give us call we would love to work with you and that being said i am sarah tolson and this is megan aarons with gladfest consulting have a good day bye guys [Music] you