this to start and i think we're live so yes this is troy welcome to another workflow wednesday on now with troy and i'm excited we're in the midst of the knowledge season with servicenow if you're new to servicenow every may for as long as i can remember it's been knowledge season knowledge is a user conference to talk all about servicenow and this year it's been a little bit different there are indeed four of them so we're halfway through and today where's my pin button i'm joined by martin and brienne from third era from third era digital martin will you say hello hi troy hi everyone thanks for having us of course brie hey troy hey martin nice to see you again thank you both for joining me i know as we've looked at knowledge you know each year they try to have a little different focus and with everything that has been you know this pandemic with all the change across the world of work the experience matters for employees and for customers and experience has been the focus of knowledge but you know one of the things i wanted to spend really some time today is to hear you know your stories how did you get so focused on user experience maybe i could go first yeah awesome so i think user experience when i look back at like my career to up till this point i feel like user experience has always been really important in everything that i've done so i have a degree in communications as well as graphic design which then turned into more digital work online with websites and things like that and i felt like i was always wanting to talk to the people using the product so right from my early days straight out of school up until now i was always so interested and so curious about the users and i always joke with my team i love hearing what people love but it's even more fun for me to hear what people don't like and what really bothers them in those frustrations because i really feel like we need to learn directly from our users we need to work on listening and ask questions so that we can understand their frustrations around things and empathize with them to figure out a better solution so i think your question was how did i get into user experience and i think it was just natural for me out of curiosity and it's something that i've used in every one of my jobs up until now right i think for me i come from the engineering side of the house the electrical engineering and and early on i'm going to date myself with this but voice of the customer was a big deal we started looking at product design in and you know actually way back then we push the envelope a little bit and say it's not just voice of the customer because in focus groups you can get kind of biased it's really environment to the customer um and it's looking at you know where do products live eat and breathe around our users and so you know common curiosity cool thank you bri martin how about you how did you get into this focus so for me it was a bit different and it was more around the technical side of user experience uh i've been on the servicenow platform for almost 15 years now so uh it's been a you know a wild ride and right at first it was uh cms and it was one of those things that there was some a lot of training around that very little people could do it so it was just something i i fell into and then it was a natural transition to portal and and through the technical side it started having those conversations right because you you can see it you know a customer go through a massive digital transformation coming into service now but if at the end of the day the experience is not good you're not going to get all the benefits that that you're hoping for uh so i think those are more of the the conversations we're starting to see now it's i'm here now how can i take it to the next level right right that that helps you know understand your background a little bit more and then you know we've talked a bunch internally as part of third era with third era digital let's jump to knowledge and so martin you were in new york city and bray you were across the pond in the netherlands um at a real live in-person event you know what was the one thing that you that kind of shocked you as you jumped into a knowledge event in person that that you weren't quite expecting this time um i think what really shocked me was how happy everyone was to see each other because i think we've been in person a little bit but it was always with a mask on and there was still some mass wearing um for certain people but i think that was so nice to walk into a room and just feel that warmth of everybody had that excitement inside and just the smiles and the talking to everyone and you could just see like old friends reconnecting and those like yeah relationships that had always been there but have been through a screen and i think to get to meet lots of our colleagues luckily for me um in a mia for the first time get to meeting get to meet them in person and just have those conversations live go and have a coffee and go and watch what was going on at the conference was just so special it was like yeah an energy it all it energy energized us yeah that energy was where this sticks out so it's that's cool to hear martin how about you yeah i think it was similar i mean it's been three years in the working right to try to be back in in person uh much smaller setup right that there weren't like i think last knowledge there were like 30 000 people and and now it was much smaller but i was still shocked that i was you know still running into former colleagues customers so it was good and everyone was was just happy it was it was needed and and i can tell you they're ready for more they want to go back to to the big ones so so it's very nice to see that yeah that's very cool from a third era perspective you know one of the things that we've seen over the transformation of like you know over a year in some months right um we've grown so much in and as customers are looking at the platform they have more than 2 000 partners to choose from i keep saying is as i reach out as is one of our client executives that third era does stand out we have breadth across the platform we have depth across the platform as well as reach across the globe but tell me about when you think about at the knowledge experience there are some ways that third era stood out let's let's talk a little bit about that some of them in a quirky way someone in practical right maybe i could start with some of the quirky ways so um what we did in uh den hogg was we set up a coffee cart right outside the conference so there was a lot of rules um and we didn't break any rules we just got very strategic about the location on this sidewalk but we had a coffee cart serving um coffee that was in black cups with the third era logo on it and right away when people were getting off the bus we were kind of calling them over to have a coffee with us and it was just great to start the engagement right there and start meeting people um it didn't hurt that we were in head to toe pink suits we were dubbed the pig panther ladies so that was really fun and then all of our guys had um pink suspenders on so i think we really stood out just from a branding perspective there our marketing at third era is next level next era and i think the pink and all the dark themes that we had really set us apart um on that side as well so those are some of the quirky ways i think we really stood out yeah i think the way they put it is they wanted us to be mobile booths so yeah basically having the logo it was like we were walking through terrace uh and it you know it paid off because that uh i i was not like in one of the areas that was in the show floor and i had people from across the room walk over because they saw the shirt and the fact that they light up it did help too to draw attention that's very fun i think some of the ways that that christina and our entire marketing department has done so much tremendous work over the past year of really coming up with some you know energetic you know vibrant branding to stand out is is great but i i think it's not only catches the attention where it's like what was that was that an aeronaut i need to talk to them um but you know let's dig into that a little bit further whether it's you know some of the topics that you had or you know when i've abundant knowledge it's always the meetings after the meetings that that i enjoyed most uh what were some of those either the topics that that you saw the reaction for the audience or some of those meetings after the meetings were you you just really enjoyed those martin do i go first sure i'll take this one first i mean for for me it was a big shock to to see a change like at previous knowledge conferences we were the ones educating on experience right we were trying to educate why d why does it matter why do you need this right and it was a tough sell it was never a priority where now i i saw a total shift right of uh servicenow talking experience but but also customers coming coming to us and not telling us why do i need this more i need this desperately and you're the people who help me uh and and it's not you know it's not just portal it's it's everything right they they start looking at the experience end to end and and just by asking questions you can understand that you know a lot of the times you know customers are following a road map but they don't stop to think what are the the elements we we need here because that's as design can be crucial also content is crucial right so uh there were a lot of discussions there as to you know them trying to go back and think why did we implement portal what were we trying to accomplish and and where did we fall short and how can we uh prevent that so so those conversations at least to me were extremely rewarding uh after our session uh a lot of people came by as well uh because it's they they saw the session as a very simple message and very easy to relate to right and easy for them to go back and say we need to start doing this and we need to do it from the beginning uh we gotta you know every time we look at a process we gotta think about about experience so so to me that that was extremely rewarding i think it's cool that you see that oh sorry brie i was just gonna to say that you know one of the things that sticks out is you know what when i came up with this name now with troy the now means two things what's happening on servicenow platform which of course is knowledge which is part of what we're talking about but the other thing is what's happening in the business world right now and it's it's cool that you're seeing that is is that people are realizing that whether it's combating a great resignation or attracting great talent and retaining great talent but it's also that brick and mortar has changed that so often you know the way that customers are interacting with the companies they do business with is completely transformed to be much more digital so their experience matters and and i think that's been drilled in that if we're going to survive either from a talent or a customer experience side of the house that digital experience matters so much yeah and i was just going to add on to what martin was saying i think part of our presentation we really talked about meeting customers and clients where they're at in their journey and so i think before design and experience and talking to your users had this bad wrap of slowing things down and creating this bottleneck and so i think we had a lot of really great conversations around the advisory side of it so like tell us what you've already heard from your users and we're not saying that you always have to start at square one you don't have to follow our process always starting at the beginning like we'll come and meet you where you're where you are in your journey and we'll extract that information in the best way we can because some of these customers have 80 000 employees that they want to survey well we've got a solution for that we can do qualitative and quantitative data so that we can track some of those numbers get a baseline figured out and then keeping them on path with their target goal not slowing them down but listening to their users and talking about phased approaches so we had a lot of great conversations around that as well i like that where it's not just starting from scratch you know it's like and that's one of the things i've enjoyed about third air is in a number of different fronts do we have assessments absolutely right we've got assessments in a whole number of different places because often we need to come in and help an organization figure out where they're at and that could be with experience it could be in their cmdb it could be on csdm right let's add some more acronyms to it all the itx there's lots of assessments but many of our clients already have that it's like they come and say well i've got this and so it's it's cool to hear you talk about you know being able to jump in with that that data and jump with it further um tell me a little bit more about the sessions that you guys both were involved in presenting so the session that we presented was called ux matters um how experienced can make or break your platform was that important i feel like i was a fighter i think we went through like 17 different names before you had all very similar but we just talked about how like the servicenow platform is so strong and it's such a powerful platform but it sometimes takes a little bit of extra time and talking to your users and really understanding again where the customers at in their journey what um release are they on what release are they going to so we really just talked about how we can talk to your users meet you where you're at on your journey but just elevate the servicenow platform and i love analogy so one of the ones that we use was like it's like if you're moving from one house to another we talk to you about what furniture you're gonna take with you but what you plan on upgrading later so we take all of that into account when we're talking to your users but then when we're developing and designing as well so this might be what you need right now in your journey but we can look into the future and we can have those bigger plans so i would say our presentation talked about some of the things that we think might break sometimes your platform and we've got some best practices around that but just also talking about what's the long-term goals what are you going towards next and how we can go along with you yeah and then the other tactical actions with you know a little bit of strategic view right mixing both mark yeah sorry martin what yeah i was gonna add and then we we also layered in the the architecture piece uh around the platform and and that's one of the unique things about third era that we can have uh the experience team but also very strong architecture team to make sure that anything that's being put forward to the to the customer is not going to introduce issues with their servicenow platform so it's always all going to be aligned and they can know that you know we're we're guiding them in the right direction so so we also cover that and we talk about ocm as well which is as important as experience our advisor in ocm practice is sure taking off um you know is in some respects i think it's experience with a different moniker right um it's it's almost setting the stage for the experience as as you drive a adoption and help people understand why are we changing the experience and service now whether it's internally or otherwise very cool stuff around ocm i think another thing we talked about martin you reminded me with your architecture piece there is how we bring architecture throughout the journey as well so we are not talking to your users in a silo and then designing in a silo and then saying all right martin's team catch i hope this like works out because we've really learned that designers and developers can work really well together and have really great suggestions along the way and sometimes it's as simple as where is this filter icon located and that can really change what you're creating on the platform to be better and not break for future upgrades so we bring along the third era team of designers and developers along the way but also internal teams too we want to make sure that the knowledge transfer happens in the way that makes sense for our customers and where they're at and if they have an internal ux team or corp coms or someone that we need to work with for brand alignment we want to talk to them early and often because we're all on the same team we're all on the team of success and adoption at the end so if we can bring everyone on to a degree we never want too many cooks in the kitchen but we've got tactics around that too just the value in doing that as well cool one of the other things that i think is always interesting you know you talked about ui changing and martin you you know if you look at the history of all the different ui changes that servicenow has been through through those years and you know it used to be before joining third era i could say yeah i've been around since before the aspen release these are great these are real gray hairs there's so many of us around 30 or they've been around that long and we've seen those changes you know with san diego there's there's so much new capability around experience that comes comes forward what would you guys say for clients is they're kind of looking at the the new ui looking at you know service portal to ec looking at some of those ways they might be you know kind of rethinking all right we got here but we forgot about experience what would you say customers should be thinking as they step back and either look at the new capabilities on the platform or kind of rethinking where experience should be on their roadmap i personally think it's you know they need to define success that's something we cover on the presentation as well because the you know service portal you see that their products right and they can help you achieve many things but if you're not defining success i i've seen customers that they tell me that they implemented ec and when i go to it it's one link right so it's not implemented easy right so are you trying to check a box that you did this or are you trying to meet an objective is their success criteria at that point we'll determine is is easy the right way to go do we want to do something in ui builder so so there's multiple options right so so i think that's that's the key thing it's just turning it on it's the same thing as a virtual agent you can turn it on but if you don't have good conversations it's not going to provide any value so so to me that's that's the key thing and that's why sometimes we say we'll meet you in your journey uh you know we'll listen we'll define success so we understand where you are and and what you're you're going to need to do right in order to get to that elevated experience yeah focusing on why right bree yeah the why five times and make sure they can answer it all my fun techniques i think when you're talking martin about defining success some great conversations that we had um after our presentation was success sometimes means two things it could be stakeholder success and it could be user success so we like to kind of portion it out into different workshops and with different techniques to say okay stakeholders voice of the users what does success look like to you and then of course we don't share that with the users and we hear directly from them what success looks like and then we all come back to the table and we say okay from a business perspective the stakeholders feel this is success this is what we're hearing from your users let's align on a compromise success or what do you feel success means right now and let's not lose this second idea maybe for another phase but sometimes it's confusing because users might be shouting for something but they might not be aware of what's going on for future upgrades in the platform so that's a fun game of what's the best definition of success or what's the compromise [Music] yeah i was just going to say martin you know one of the things that i've seen in in some of our client engagements is it really depends who comes into that room that sometimes we come in and say we really need to focus on what does our experience look like on our platform and and we have more employees and customers we can reach out to and pull in and so you end up having these internal user conversations and and you get this great focus of here's here's what matters here's why here's why here's why and and then you realize well we forgot that forgot but let's pull in a louder voice from our customers what do they say and that's where they can diverge a little bit but it's important to have both of those audiences in there as well as stakeholders trying to find that compromise of what success looks like is important yeah and i i think the the other thing as well is painting a picture uh for them as to what will this look like after the engagement because they can implement knowledge but if they don't have a team maintaining that content it comes out of date right and people will stop coming in so so something it's a shift right that for them success might be less calls but that doesn't mean that those people are going to have less things on their plate right you're going to have a bit of a shift because the moment you open things up right to self-service people have a different expectation right if if i go uh online shopping today i expect to see progress and a lot of things that then people are bringing back to work right and they're like i expect the same level of transparency so it's a bit of a shift on how people are working to make sure that everything's updated and relevant right so so that's something that that we put a lot of emphasis in when we're doing especially portal implementations to make sure that anything we do we're not introducing new skills to their technical team so they can still maintain it with their current training uh so they can make those quick fixes right uh because i mean sometimes you you might expect even weekly content updates uh and you know for people to come to that page and see what's what's new here right so so i think that's that's that's important it's content and the other thing that i've heard your team say multiple times and and i've seen the capabilities on the platform to be able to do it is is we're also equipping our customer teams to be able to um i don't say re-skin it because that's too heavy but really change some of the visuals so that not only is the content up to date like you're talking martin because we see new things we see our users are asking for what they're using more we can craft and improve those i think there's some of just keeping the look and feel and changing some of the images perhaps there's the seasonal update right um but i've i've seen your teams educate our clients and here's some ways that you can keep these fresh that it doesn't look like oh same image it was here nine months ago it it's much easier to change on the platform than i think some digital platforms in the past yeah and i think you can use that as an opportunity to show your users that you're listening too so we talk about ocm but another thing that we say is like when you launch a portal be sure to listen right away because people will speak up about what they like or don't like and what they're missing and if you can update something and they say like oh i can't find whatever the button is if you can update and maybe change the hierarchy of that on the page right away a user will log back in and be like oh man i was just complaining about this and they listened and they changed it and from a technical perspective that's a really easy change but it goes a long way with creating trust with your users and and don't just define that you do that once it's it's like even that person they're going to talk about how the feedback loop worked and it's it's reinforcing and you see much more of that so that's a good good call out to make yeah and i think you have to be careful that you're not over promising and under delivering so when we're in the user interviews and stuff a user might say like martin said i want it to be like when i'm shopping on amazon yeah we agree that would be awesome but based off of what we can provide right now this is what we're looking at but just telling users too like the plan for the future of course is going to be getting that way and thanks for that great idea we're going to make a note and not lose that because lots of times like we said in our presentation martin it's the whiffam the what's in it for me and everyone's just concerned like as a fulfiller as a manager as a user as a requester they just want their jobs to be easier and they just want their work to be easier so they want to understand that see if you can listen and empathize with them and say we hear that this is a frustration for you in the future we're going to try to do it but in the short term this is our solution what do you think that goes a long way absolutely we're watching our time one of the things that i'd like to get your thoughts on before we close up is is kind of parting thoughts we're in between you know halfway through the knowledge events of this year third era was out both of that we had already so far and we've got two more coming up so las vegas and australia we've got you know third arrow presence at both of those but if someone's watching or someone's looking you know for some help around experience what are some ways that they can you know engage with us at third era bree this is all you [Laughter] no i didn't want to step on your toes i think there's so many ways that we could engage and i think the different um leads that we got even from den hogg were so interesting because the engagement is it needs to start again with where the customers at in their journey so what we're trying to do is just get a really good understanding so one of our workshops that we have is called the discovery workshop and so if we can just set that up with our customers and say okay tell us where you're at could you show us a bit of a reverse demo we can talk to you a bit more about our process and see where you land on that but we can also start asking the right technical questions because we want to make sure that we're not promising something again on the design side that we can't deliver so we would have someone from martin's team a developer a solution architect um somebody like that to come in with us as designers to say okay let's just listen listen listen and hear everything that you're doing show us a few things we'll kind of check our best practices tool box and see some suggestions right away but just engaging with us so that we can understand and we can also show you some use cases of here's something that we've done really similarly that we think might work for you of course we need to dive in a little bit deeper but just having that kind of feedback back and forth martin would you have anything to add to kind of that idea yeah what i say is don't be afraid of change it's you know something that that needs to happen people are expecting it and we can help we can we can take you through that journey uh once again regardless if today you have a full self-service experience let us look at it let us see what's what's working what's not working uh you know and we we can we can paint a picture for you and we can take you there one thing i'll add to that too is any baseline that you can give us is so helpful so if you have martin what's it called the user experience analytics turned on for a portal or if any google analytics or any kind of baseline that we can set right off the bat is super helpful as well the other thing that i've i've seen has been helpful as we've gone into some of these engagements too is it's kind of like if you're going to an architect you show up with the the list of photos of all the homes you like a lot of that is true from experience too is is if you can come in with you know we've talked to a handful of our users even just you know individually here are some things i like here's some things that i don't that helps so much as as we sit down with customers kind of learn where they're at because everyone comes with a little different perspective and industries are different too so it's always good to say you know you know here's here's some things that resonate and don't is a good place to start any any parting shots uh you know thank you both for coming on a workflow wednesday with me i appreciate all that you guys do um but closing thoughts for people that are watching today i think my biggest closing thought is think about experience bigger than just maybe one piece of it if it is um platform or portal that's definitely one component but think about the whole experience and think about experience in your daily life i know we've all walked up to a door not been sure if it's a push or pull um think about those experience and how frustrating sometimes those things are and see what you can translate it to when you're on the platform but just all the different components of that i tell my team all the time the first email we send a customer is an experience a powerpoint or a presentation experience a meeting like this is an experience and we're always striving to make all of those things great absolutely martin i would say check out all the content that's being put out on the thirdera knowledge on demand including the metaverse experience which is our little virtual uh knowledge so make sure to check all that out and reach out for any questions you might have maybe i could add to that with a little teaser we actually have an on-demand session coming out next week where we show how we interview users and we talk a bit about empathy mapping and the importance of user interviews so that will be on the knowledge on demand session might be great to check out very good go to thirdair.com there's tremendous information there our marketing team continues to blow our minds with the amount of information that's there uh our youtube channel and of course you can reach out to me now with troy and you can find each of us on linkedin easy to find and do reach out and and if if you've been watching this and you made it this far do reach out and let's find a time where we can sit down let's see where we can meet you at your journey where you're at and talk through how we could help you improve the experience in your organization but with that thanks so much for joining have a great rest of the week