Dear Santa,

You know I love the ServiceNow platform and I use it all the time in my work. Just between you and me, I think the product teams in headquarters sometimes focus on shiny new stuff and ignore the old standbys so many of their customers still rely on every day. Maybe this year for Christmas, your elves can make the new year a little brighter for all the users of the tool, regardless of which products on the platform they are using. Santa, I hope our friends at ServiceNow won’t wait until the entire user interface is rewritten to make usability improvements to the old interfaces that we still use all the time. For some reason, ideas like these get ignored in the idea portal, but they can’t ignore Father Christmas himself!

• List views. I look enviously at other kids with their fancy new SaaS applications that have list views where the kids can resize the width of the columns, drag around column headers to change the order the columns appear, and drag a column heading to the top of the list area to group the list by that column. We need this functionality on the list views that are pervasive throughout the platform, not just on a handful of new UI interfaces.
• Reports with multiple levels of indentation grouping. We always been able to do a single level of grouping on reports. As our data grows, it is quite common to need two or more levels of grouping where I can collapse any level of the view. Furthermore, when displaying a group, it is very helpful to have the groupings indented below their parent. For some reason, the feature that is common on other platforms is missing in ServiceNow!
• View-only mode for reports. Santa, why are reports in edit mode every time you look at them? I don’t need a dashboard with multiple reports. I just want to view a single report. I could send a link to that report to a coworker. And every time they look at that report, they are in edit mode for the report. This behavior is baffling. Most of the time I’m viewing a report, I don’t need to edit it. I think ServiceNow expects us to put a report on a dashboard, but that has drawbacks compared to viewing the report directly. Please, Santa, help us get a view-only mode for reports and make that the default view for a report—even for people with rights to edit the report.
• Reports with calculated fields. Sure, there can be a few pre-defined calculation fields on a table that can be used in reports. But when I’m running ad hoc reports, I want to be able to see simple calculations for each row, or do simple calculations using values from various columns. This functionality exists in the platform, but it is inexplicably locked away from regular report creators across my organization. Most report creators must resort to exporting to Excel to get their work done—on a stale copy of the data. We can do better in-platform so people have fewer times they need to take the data out of the platform!! If one of the elves tries to tell you that Performance Analytics is the solution to this problem, don’t let them fool you. This isn’t advanced reporting functionality. It is table stakes! And I’m saying that as a customer with access to Performance Analytics who is a big fan of the tool.
• Flexible Date/Time Entry. When I go to fill in a due date field, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could type in “three days” or “one week” and ServiceNow would apply some AI smarts to it and put in a valid date/time? The format required to type in a date and time is exceedingly painful when typing and a zillion clicks if using a mouse. I’m pretty fast at typing regular words, so please let me use natural language more often in the platform, starting with date fields. I confess Santa, that this has been on my list since my last letter to you almost a decade ago. Whether it is using natural language words or some other UI improvement, we have to make it nicer to work with date and time fields for users.

Thanks, Santa, for all you do! I can’t wait until Christmas!

Labels:

• User Experience and Design