it's 2022 and our ui ux landscape continues to evolve you've got questions like when to turn on our new ui or when it's best to use ui builder versus service portal our guest today is here to help answer questions like this welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins builders developers and of course all the curious individuals and i say that with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode i've got the pleasure of once again talking to brad tilton with a new title senior principal outbound product manager how are you today brad i'm doing really well chuck thanks for having me on it is my longest title that i've had we've got some doozies in this company we do welcome back to breakpoint and for listeners brad was a developer advocate for several years right up until april of 2022 so tell us a little bit about this new role with the long title yes the new role uh is uh in outbound product management uh for our next experience uh set up set of products and so my role is really around evangelizing the next experience and enabling people on using ui builder and theming and all of those things with my colleague ashley snyder who's pretty well known in the dev community as well and so yeah we are kind of working on lots of enablement materials for ui builder and all sorts of things the second half of this year and then we do a lot of talking to customers and partners and kind of you know positioning how people should be using uh some of the tooling and then we are collecting tons of feedback um so you know we try to anytime you ask a question on the community or slack or wherever uh you know we're trying to capture a lot of those at least the high level themes and the questions so that we can make our products better and we can you know put out the right enablement materials and that's the whole purpose of this show right sort of an audio faq if you will we wanted to just gather those up like you said we're we're seeing some patterns in the questions that are being asked so he said chuck can we put this on break point i said happily let's start with our first one are there any considerations for activating the next experience and what should i know before i turn it on yeah so that's a good question um you know to backtrack a little bit we released this next experience ui in the san diego release if you provisioned a new instance in the san diego release it was automatically turned on uh you know you get the the pretty ui and it's all unified and then if you're an existing customer in the upgrade there's a property you can turn on that then turns on uh the new ui instance wide and then there's also a user preference that you can set for individual users that controls whether they see the the older ui or the next experience ui and so that lets you kind of migrate uh different groups at different times if you want to so in terms of whether you should turn it on or not we think that you get the most bang for your buck out of the new ui when you're using configurable workspaces so these are things like the csm configurable workspace the service service operations workspace that came out for itsm in the san diego time frame through the store and then some of the other configurable workspaces we have out there so one of the nice things about the new ui is that when you open one of these configurable workspaces it opens within the overall ui um so we're kind of reducing browser tab sprawl uh in terms of that and that was really one of the big pushes so that our fulfillers aren't you know all over the place in lots of different tabs so in terms of you know should you turn it on or not uh i mean always we're both developers uh always test you know turn it on in a sub prod test it i think that goes without saying but i'll say it anyway uh you know you want to turn it on and test it and there's a couple of things um that uh that are not supported in the san diego version of the next experience ui uh so those things are guided tours uh is kind of the big thing so if you are a customer that is using guided tours and that's a big part of your fulfiller experience those are not supported in san diego although we are targeting a near future release to support guided tours so they will eventually be supported uh in the new ui and then the other one is connect chat so connect chat is also not supported in the new ui but we should have a replacement uh you know safe harbor there is a replacement coming in the tokyo for connectchat so you know some of those things aren't uh supported right away in the san diego release but they are going to be supported yeah there's a couple more on here uh table schema map vtbs and then one thing i do want to call out is there's been some confusion around whether atf is supported or not and so atf is still supported in the core ui of next experience but it's not supported in configurable workspaces yet good to know so turning on next experience ui isn't really going to change what what you can test and what you can't test um so that's really more if you're looking at moving from you know the the core ui into a configurable workspace that is a consideration for that but not really turning on next experience ui so all of your existing tests if they work in a previous release they should work in the next experience ui you know obviously if you're doing some sort of like custom ui testing that involves the header and things like that like the header changed in the new ui so those are probably not going to work anymore you might want to test that out yeah do some exploring on your pdi you've got access to it there so find out what works and what doesn't that's that's exactly what pdi's are for in my opinion is a sandbox before you even turn this on in your your company's dev instance you've got some hands-on you know where the where the bounds of this box are now you mentioned agent workspace and configurable workspace what's the difference of those and what what do i need to know there yeah so that's a good question so our legacy agent workspaces came out in new york madrid it was it was a while ago yeah yeah so they came out a while ago they were kind of built on uh the first version of our new uh next experience ui framework uh and you know they were they were good uh it was a good kind of upgrade from lists and forms for a lot of our customers where they could you know get that tabbed interface within one browser tab and but a lot of the feedback we got was like hey this isn't very customizable um you know i want to be able to do some of the things that i'm able to do on lists and forms like add you know formatters to the form that have ui macros and you can do all sorts of things with them uh and so you know we kind of took that feedback and we actually um you know built out kind of a newer version of the framework or updated a little bit and so we ended up kind of re-platforming those agent workspaces onto a new more configurable version of workspace and so that's what we released in quebec with the newer version of ui builder with all the data resources and and components with events and properties that you know can talk to each other and then in quebec we release the csm configurable workspace and then app engine studio lets you create a configurable experiences both workspace and portal experiences and then in san diego service operations workspace came out which is really the itsm version of configurable workspaces so we're kind of at a point now where a lot of our customers can move from agent workspace to configurable workspaces and uh there are some some caveats in there uh depending on you know if you're really big uh csm and itsm user and you've got like a tight integration between the two um you know in the san diego version you might have to rebuild some of that integration uh we are eventually gonna kind of go in and and you know support all of those things but now is a really good time once you're on san diego to kind of look at you know is it time to migrate from agent to configurable workspaces the other nice thing about the configurable workspaces is that they show up within the unified navigation when you turn on the next experience ui um so agent workspaces are still going to open up a new tab when you turn on the new ui um so it's configurable workspaces that were really kind of rebuilt so that they can open up within that unified navigation oh nice so you really don't have to care which one it is from a consumer standpoint they're just there yeah so so what we often refer to as the runtime experience you know once you're a consumer of the experience looking at the page that experience doesn't really change much from agent workspaces to configurable workspaces it's really the back end and how you're able to configure them you know in a configurable workspace you can create a variant of a page and move things around on a page and add you know new components to your record page and all sorts of things like that so it's you know much more configurable hence the name configurable workspaces we're so good at naming at least they make sense that's right very creative but they make sense now let's talk about some of the technical investment we've made in the past ui macros ui pages that kind of thing can customers still use those going forward yes so uh i remember i think we were probably both on this call maybe a year and a half two years ago when they were first kind of previewing what this new ui was going to be like and one of the big goals was that it was going to be backwards compatible you know we have a lot of customers that have been around for a long time they've built all sorts of really awesome things that help you know make their make their business work better and we want to make sure that we support uh as much of that as we can and so you know you've got ui macros and ui pages our core ui which is what we what we call a you know the kind of lists and forms type view the core ui um still supports all of those things so it's still you know jelly based uh we've just kind of made it to where we can put this wrapper around it and you know uplevel the styling and the theming and everything so you know that's still there there are some things like if you have dark mode everybody's excited about dark mode dark mode doesn't apply to core ui yet uh so it's only going to apply to kind of the shell you know the the menus and the header and everything but it won't apply to a core ui list or form yet but that is also a thing that we're looking to uplift so in the future you know you should be able to apply all of your styling to um the lists and the form views as well i could see some cautionary tales in there if you had a ui macro for example that had a dark blue text and suddenly your your dark theme comes in and it's dark blue on black like i can't read this thing yes it could cause some problems so task test test with whatever theme you get that's right let's switch to ui builder it's been out for a while you mentioned it earlier can you tell us more about the overall product strategy there yeah so ui builder is near near and dear to me uh i uh you know kind of got my first uh taste of it about a year and a half ago before we came out with quebec and really kind of liked the way it was put together and everything and so you know i did a lot of i did the ui builder bytes series on the youtube and developer blog um and so you know i i really have enjoyed using the tool and getting to know it a lot better um but uh it it can be fairly complex to use right now and so our you know our kind of strategy there in the near term is uh is really around ui builder usability in the next couple of releases um so we want to make it you know easier to use and configure um you know we we are we have built this kind of new technology for it we're calling uh presets and controllers uh that's going to let component authors um do some things around their components uh where they are kind of pre-setting a lot of the configuration so if you think about if you want to build out another record page you've got all these form components you've got the g-form data resource and then you have to know what parts of the geform data resource you bind to different properties and the components and when you think about it everybody always binds the same parts to the same properties um so why why don't we when you add a you know a form component to the page it automatically you know gets the right data and everything and you don't have to do all that and so that's that's our goal with the presets and controllers um you'll see some of that in in tokyo and then you know we hope to up level more of our uh components to that in the future um so you know usability is a really big push for us and ui builder in the near term when should i use ui builder versus say service portal yeah that's a great question so you know i think whenever we release a new technology it's always kind of confusing you know when do i use this thing right because the first version usually doesn't have parity with the incumbent right if you think about flow designer and workflow i think that's probably the most obvious example to people right now you know the first version of flow designer did not have anywhere close to parity with workflow uh you know at this point we have achieved parity and surpassed it uh you know by a long way i i feel like um i know not everyone feels like that but uh i think we're there they still want their role back it's like you're not gonna get a roll back if you need a rollback you're doing it wrong am i turn style that's right um but so ui builder and service portal have different use cases right now and it's not a it's actually not a perfect comparison to workflow because right now for ui builder and service portal they are really our two supported ui technologies ui ux technologies so they're both supported they both have their use cases and so um the easiest way to think about it is that ui builder in its san diego tokyo form is really geared towards modifying uh fulfiller experiences and if you have to creating your own fulfiller experiences so its audience is really fulfiller focused and then service portal is really our requester focused uh ui tool so you know when you get a little more granular than that it's if your experience needs to use any sort of catalog functionality there is technically a catalog component for ui builder but in most cases it's probably not going to do what you need it's really for like being able to open a you know record producer from uh a workspace that you're already in it's not for you know letting a thousand people order a new ipad or something like that right um so anything that involves catalog is still service portal um any like enterprise wide portals are probably still better suited for service portal if your portal needs to be available publicly it is technically a thing you can do in ui builder but it's probably not a thing that you want to do right now because it involves a lot of custom data resources and things like that so public portals i i still think service portal is the right answer for in addition to that we have responsive portals so if your portal needs to be mobile friendly that's still a service portal only thing so ui builder does not create uh responsive experiences it is possible to create you know a page that looks okay on mobile if you need to but it's not responsive by default like a service portal is using bootstrap so again service portal for requesters ui builder for fulfillers and in ui builder uh when you get more into that fulfiller experience we really think it's best that you start with one of our configurable workspaces so if you're an itsm customer start with the itsm configurable workspace which is called service operations workspace and you know try that and you know hopefully that does what uh what you want for your fulfillers uh it's it's pretty extensive um that workspace same with csm and then if you have to create your own workspace you can do that and then create your own fulfiller experience if you've got a custom app and you're using app engine studio that's a really good candidate for creating your own workspace and i think that gets a little easier for map engine studio in the future as well so that's that's a big a big thing that i wanted to hit on is ui builder fulfill fulfillers service portal for requesters and it's going to be like that for a little while um so this is not a thing where in tokyo we're going to say okay now everybody is ui builder for everything we've got some time so you know i think people can feel confident building out service portals right now uh that that that's going to be around a while and you know you know how long it takes us to deprecate things you know a common question we get is when is service portal going to be deprecated and it's it's long enough off that it's not on the roadmap to to deprecate it yet so it'll be quite a while before they stop working i don't even know i think if you still have a cms portal it still works i could be wrong there it's been a while but cms came out in what 2009 so um you know you've got a lot of time so yeah if you need an enterprise portal if it's doing requester related things service portal is still our answer there there's not a whole lot of development effort on our side being done for service portal i did see uh a new widget coming out in tokyo so there there's there's things that are happening to support other applications document management was one of them that i saw so it's not dead and we're not going to just simply turn it off in in some future release it's always going to be there like you said cms is there it's also really good at this point for responsive technologies if you want to put out a portal that works on mobile you can do that in service portal not available as of summer 2022 on ui builder there's also some other feature parity like external user login or external user account creation or the open id connect feature so you can use a social media account to attach your portal to uh google or facebook or whatever to to log in that way so there's still a lot of very rich features in service portal that i recommend people take a look at if you're doing a consumer external requester portal well now that you're a product manager can you give us a hint of what's on the road map for the next experience i can i can so um safe harbor again uh you know we're not we're not i may say something i probably won't say specific releases but you know we may or may not actually uh get to that in the release for all sorts of reasons your developer advocate is showing again no wait i think we got that from the product managers probably uh so something i'm fairly confident about is the tokyo release um because it's it's i don't know if we're past dev complete but it's basically done we're in we're in utah planning at the moment uh but uh one of the things that you'll see i mentioned these uh presets and controllers and so you know we're really all about ui builder usability and so something you'll see is that a lot of the form components are being updated with these presets and controllers so it's going to get way easier and faster to build out a new record page in the tokyo release so i'm really excited about that there's another there's another tokyo feature that's going to make it a lot easier to move your components around so i did a ui builder lab for creatorcon this year and you know across the two sessions we probably had a couple hundred people in it and uh by far the most common piece of uh we had a really common piece of feedback uh and it was around moving components around and they're like why can't i do this and then i talked to the inbound team and they were like oh we're doing that in tokyo and so that was a fun that was a fun thing that it was such an obvious gap that we had already fixed it before the feedback came in um so that's going to get easier we are you know i mentioned that we are going to support a connect chat replacement uh in uh in future releases uh and then we're also planning on supporting guided tours in the next experience ui in the future that that will not be a tokyo um thing i believe it'll be after tokyo but it is on on the road map i could feel listeners ears tingle when you said connect check replacement it would it was it was that vibrant like what what what did he say yeah and you you can't underestimate the value of the feedback you get at these live events when people come up that's i think you just earned your pay as an outbound product manager going to knowledge and hearing that direct feedback from people that listen people i don't know how many conferences you go to but i've gone to a few and you don't talk to the product managers directly most times it's it's really uh wonderful access so not trying to pimp future in-person events but another reason to ask your boss to go like we got direct access yeah it's definitely helpful uh from from my perspective uh you know just being able to walk around a room where while 100 people are using my product and see like uh you know five people all struggle with the same thing uh that's that's like a really obvious thing that we need to fix that it's so much harder to get that uh when people are just asking questions on the community or even doing a virtual lab yes just like looking at somebody's screen because there's an issue in ui builder if you don't have enough vertical screen real estate some things don't render very well and you know especially when you're at something like knowledge and people are maybe on like a smaller screen than they normally would be like you know maybe they have their service tablet plugged into a big monitor at home but when they're at knowledge it's smaller uh there are some things like that that you know i i wouldn't have discovered unless i was you know watching people use ui builder in person on smaller screens so yeah it's it's absolutely valuable and and one of the things we're really excited about is getting in person at snugs and developer meetups and in front of customers and really kind of getting into some of the ui builder stuff and getting some real-time feedback that's exciting stuff i i was like ooh brad is gonna be back at snugs and developer meetups with some content i could get into that yes we will have some content for sure all right easier faster i like this i might actually begin to use ui builder at some point so where could i go to learn more about the next experience ui and of course ui builder yeah that's a great question uh so we'll have some links i think in the in the episode notes um that link out to these places uh but the first one is we have spun up a next experience sub forum on the community under the now platform forum and so nice we have uh it's it's all new there's a ton of information just on the home page of that forum and uh you also can ask questions in that forum and a number of us on the product team are subscribed to it so anytime you ask a question uh against the next experience forum or topic i get an email and it goes in my inbox on the community and so we're trying to make sure you know if a question can be answered by us we're trying to answer it uh and so that's a really good place to go for help and it's a good place to get started we kind of link out of that forum to just about everywhere and so there's a ton of articles in there and then from there you can get to our next experience coe which is really kind of our it's how we've organized our all of our links and articles and everything um and so ashley snyder has done an incredible job building out that coe i think i ran a report and she had written like 45 articles in the past few months and i'm i'm at one so far so she is uh she's winning uh i don't think i'm gonna catch up but we have a ton of information so i mentioned you know she's written that many articles uh these are all like new in the last you know four or five months so this is maybe new information that you haven't seen before we've got a lot of articles on you know here's what you need to think about when turning on the next experience ui if i you know talk too fast during that question earlier you can just go to the coe and all that information is on there already names of properties and user preferences and all sorts of things and then it also links out some to some different training we have the other big question that we get is you know how do i get started with ui builder you know what kind of training do i do yes and so there are there are probably three things that i would that i would go through the first one is the now learning course for ui builder i think it's ui builder fundamentals it's been updated for san diego and it's a really good starting place for getting started with ui builder and then after that we have i think five modules in the ui builder course on the developer site so that's a good exercise to do next uh and then i built a ui builder creatorcon lab that also is a good thing to go through it it gets into um it may go a little deeper in some areas you know we cover repeaters and theming and all sorts of things in that lab so i think those are probably your best three resources to go through and i would do them now learning developer site and then creatorcon lab and so you can get links to those from our coe uh also i will just say if you are using the next experience ui in your production instance uh you know we'd love to talk to you and get feedback on you know how you think it can be better and how you're using it [Music] and and then also if you're building experiences with ui builder or customizing experiences with ui builder we'd love to get feedback and and hear about that how that's going and you know there's a few ways to connect with um connect with me or our team uh and that's you know you can always reach out to your account executive or your solution consultant those are kind of the best ways to go through that so that everything goes through the right channels uh and you know they can get a hold of our team and give us some feedback uh or if that is proving difficult uh you can absolutely just reach out to me um personally and uh that goes into how do you get a hold of me you know the show too well you can go to my linkedin uh which is uh you know whatever the linkedin thing is slash brad tilton same with my twitter and you know my email is my name at servicenow so i i'm fairly easy to get a hold of i'm on s dev slack i'm on the um the developer discord and all sorts of areas uh so paying me on something and you know i'd love to hear feedback about how you're using uh the next experience products uh both the ui and ui builder um so yeah and i will have plenty of links in the show notes as well so the community now learning how to get a hold of brad don't worry about it if you don't have to write down these things furiously as you listen to this for new listeners experienced listeners we'll know all this already experienced hosts know how to drive the show by themselves thank you so much for joining us today brad and thank you wonderful listener don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcasts you can find them on the community under the resources menu or you can go to servicenow.com podcast subscribe to this one or any of them for totally free and get them automatically delivered to you breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer chuck tomasi video and captions by earl duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program i invite you to go over to developer.servicenow.com again thank you so much brad for all the wonderful information and we will talk to you again soon i'm sure thanks for having me chuck please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening ask me uh what okay what's your first name your last name and what song do you want to sing here's 50 things oh okay i'm not supposed to use ui builder for everything got it it does its own thing for its own thing and will for a while yeah um and um yeah that's the end of the thread did i write that or did you write that i think i maybe gave you the two things and then you wrote it oh okay i may not be able to answer any questions but at least we'll have something of course oh did we miss that in the questionnaire no i didn't i didn't i only gave a half answer chuck's gonna be retired in a wheelchair with his blanket over his lap i finally made it to houston