welcome to another episode of Glide chat um I am Megan Ahrens I'm a senior technical consultant and I helped build Glide hits I'm Lauren Tui I'm a technical consultant and I focus on Portal design and development and I helped build and design Glide kits as well hi I'm Tim engstrom I'm a ux UI lead and I am hoping to dive more into Portal design and development I'm here shortly so let's get into some of our questions the first question is what is Glide hits and why did you create it so Glide hits is a service portal that is really just Glide fast portfolio meant to show off our greatest hits um hence the name and the music theme throughout the site and it showcases some of the really cool portal designs that we've done for our clients um and we created it in the hopes that it would bring more projects and that focus on like design work how did you build it it was built on service now um and leverages the service portal we actually already had an internal custom demo app that's Sarah Tolson built um while she was here uh we took that made a few changes um built a new UI on top of it and then just made it public Lauren do you want to kind of show us so when you first come the god hits this is a landing page that you're going to see um and like we just said everything in here is built on service portal when you go in you're going to see our top mixes these are sort of our playlists of the different portals that we've built and the different categories that they sit in we've got hrsd portals the internal portals that we've built that are really cool uh unified portals which is kind of like an internet for your company when you Group by T or HR and any other departments you might have in your organization we have customer service portals and then we have itsm portals as well uh some of our really cool portals are in here like home space that we built and each of these cards is kind of like our song in each of our playlists and if you click into here you'll see a lot more detail and mock-ups and wireframes of any of the work that we have done and our hope is that you'll look through these and you'll get inspired for designs for your own portal and find things that you like and maybe want to combine different pieces from the various rules that we have because we do have quite a lot and we're going to be adding more every day do we have any like plans to include like UI Builder type things Uh custom widgets stuff like that in the future blue as we grow our library of all of these things we're planning to add that so maybe if there's a piece of custom functionality that you want to add you can look at the sort of custom options that we've built and regularly use for our customers and as UI Builder grows when it comes the new thing we're hoping to put out more examples that we've done in that it's going to be our portfolio for any work we do as servicenow grows can you tell me how organizations can benefit from our portal services well so servicenow is you know it's built to automate everything it's meant to make your life easier but while we're automating everything on the back end we have all these non-technical users in your organization that need a front-end to actually get these processes started they need somewhere to submit those requests and track any requests that they have look at any incidents do HR things you know they might need to one word someone or off board or request leave maternity leave request sick leave things like that all the daily things that you have to do within your life as an employee at a very at any organization so you need a front end for those things to happen so that the processes can be automated now we kind of want to talk about our design aspect what we want to do with our design going forward with glide pass so I'll direct this question to Tim uh just a very general question why design care if servicenow is designed so that's a great question so why should a client care if servicenow is designed you can get servicenow out of the box and prop it up there and it will be totally functional but is that the message that you really want to portray is that what your employees really want to see if you add some design layers to it you can bring in your branding it's a really simple process to just do some color overlays and drop them in there and all of a sudden you're kind of up and running and it looks something like what you have but if we can Elevate that to the next step and really bring in some messaging bring in some design cues to help your employees and your customers move about through your experience then it will really Elevate what they're capable of how to close cases faster and just really be more efficient with your employees and your customers yeah that's a really good answer design is a lot more important than we think it is what is one of the biggest challenges you have when working with a clients in regards to design the design in itself can be very subjective um and I think that is probably one of the biggest challenges in working with clients is from my perspective being a ux designer is dealing with empathy and working with the user the end user in mind constantly and one of the challenges with a client is is that they'll sit there and they'll bring their personal biases or their personal tastes to the table and I find the biggest challenge is just really communicating how to remove themselves from that bias and from that perspective and say this isn't for you this is for the user and how can we Elevate that up and say oh yes so users don't want to see 500 lists and tables all thrown at them all at once it's a it's a bad experience they just want to see what they want to see right then and right right there so it's it's communication I guess would be the biggest challenge and getting them to empathize with the user who they're trying to Target right so you mentioned that you're a ux designer how is ux design different from regular design that is the million dollar question I kind of look at it in three different ways you have design in itself which is just making something look good um my best sort of akin to just art and it's going to look really good not necessarily going to be functional the next phase that a lot of businesses are comfortable with understanding is brand design and that's applying your colors your design rules to really personify the website or the portal as yours and this really works that way ux design is going to take that to the next level it's going to take the the prettiness it's going to take the brand messaging and then we're going to apply some behaviorism over on the top of that to make sure that when a user comes onto the platform they know what they need to do they need to know how to do it they get all the information they have it turns it into a bit more of an intuitive platform there's less guesswork and there's just more efficiency and that's why we really like to talk about ux design and sometimes it's referred to as human-centered design because it really puts the person up front and how they can use it and how they can succeed with it which is a huge benefit towards the company my last question for you is is there any value in designing a portal I think there's value in designing everything um one thing that we can kind of step back and look at from a more materialistic point of view is this if we look at Ikea all of their Furniture is built to be or it's created to be built by somebody at home um so you're looking at the user putting something together in the most simple way possible and I think that that's one of the things that we like to look at here is when we're building a portal is how can we put it together in the most simple way possible so that anybody can come in know what they need to do get their information and still fall in love with your brand whether it's an employee who knows that they just want to come in and they want to submit their time it may not be something that they want to do but how can we make it as pleasurable as possible they can go in they can do it one one click they're in they're submitting their time make it as painless as possible same thing with customers as they come in they have an issue and to me this is probably one of the biggest pain points any company has is by they time they're coming to your portal to look for help because something that they have of yours isn't functioning right there's anger there's depression there's frustration they're at their wit's end they want a solution how can we alleviate that by with with some nice messaging with an easy way to open a case or to find a knowledge base that will help them with their problem really quick and get that satisfaction back they had when they initially engaged with your company thank you for listening in on our Glide hits Glide chat and we welcome to have any questions um come at us at any time and we would love to talk to you more about how design can elevate servicenow [Music] thank you [Music]