all right a very warm welcome to all of you in our next session of employee Center Academy today we will be focusing on design techniques for kick-starting your employee Center deployment so for those of you who have joined this for the first time I just want to set some more context so employee Center Academy is a series of sessions we do this monthly and it is your time with the product team and servicenow experts so please use this session to ask your questions interact we love it when you raise your hand and you pause and you like you say that we we have a comment um please please do that as we go through this session we're trying to make sure this is not a presentation we configure the product live and it makes sense um and we want this to be more like a workshop or more like a your time to engage with us and like I said these are monthly sessions we we do this every month but our December one is canceled just because of the holiday season and we will come back again in January with our new topic for 2023. now um if you have registered for Academy sessions you would um you would essentially be registered for all the sessions so make sure you have the calendar invites added into your calendar and you would be receiving um email updates by from Zoom talking about the next um the next topic if you're not on community and following it over there but ultimately you can go in both in community and your emails to get the next topic in terms of logistics we do have a q a panel and we all are experts on the call today we will be Manning it very closely so please post all your questions there and use the Q a panel specifically for questions and not the chat chat is more for your comments we you as you saw there is representation like from around the world so please engage add your comments add your thoughts um everyone on this call will appreciate it and the slides and the video recording for this will be available for you so don't worry about taking notes taking screenshots um it does take a couple of days um or a little bit here and there to get the video up on YouTube but it will be on YouTube as well as on our community page so um everything from q a slides and videos will be available for you after the session some of the resources you hopefully are familiar with our employee center community we just recently did a revamp of it so things are still settling down over there but please use that as your channel for getting um or self-serving yourself for any best practices or keeping up to date with events like this we also have a now learning course um focused on employee Center um now create resources which help you self-implement and a whole YouTube playlist which is recordings of these events um available for you we will have additional resources highlighted at the end which will be more specific to our discussion today but just wanted to highlight these more broadly from an employee Center perspective all right so let's get into our topic so today's topic like I mentioned is design techniques for kickstarting your employee Center deployment and we get so many questions from organizations who are doing this and how do we get started what are the most important thing what are the techniques that I could use to um to essentially build alignment across my stakeholders design and MVP and so on in fact I want to expand this and say it's not just for those who are kick-starting their deployment but as they are thinking about their next iteration the techniques that we will talk about today are equally important for that as well we have two really awesome experts in this field joining us today so first is AJ who um who is our in-house expert for everything related to portal and also design and and Nicole who is joining from our work workflow Design Studio who is a special that which is a special team focusing on doing design workshops with customers and helping them create that you know that unique design that they want so AJ you want to add to that introduction and then Nicole you can sure um I am actually focused on experience enablement so sessions like these and helping our customers and partners understand how to apply ux to their service and implementations whether that's designed best practices or usability testing techniques we're here to really help educate the community on how to bring that in and not just let it be a developer-centric approach to implementation so very happy to be here um hi I'm Nicole and thank you so much for having us um My Team Works directly with customers on their complex challenges to help them kick start and get that Vision kind of mapped and using service Blueprinting and a cross-functional you could call it growth hacking or lean ux kind of approach so thanks so much for having us it's great to be here thanks Nicole thanks AJ and just to add my name is Puja Gupta I am the host for employee Center Academy session so you will see or you will hear my voice every time we do this um and I'm super happy to have Nicole and AJ join us today for this for this session so here's what we will do we will first start with just some high level overview of Service delivery Trends and best practices when it comes to like addressing those um Service delivery use cases then Nicole will dive deep into design thinking techniques that they use uh within the work the workplace Design Studio and then we will also cover some techniques for building an employee-centric taxonomy which I know a lot of you are focused on and then we will wind up with some additional resources and as I just quickly reminder please keep asking your questions in Q a and we will have additional time in the end for open q a as well all right so AJ over to you all righty thank you so much Pooja Nicole for having me so one of the things I've been spending a lot of time thinking about with my team is what are some best practices we can impart on customers when designing uh outstanding self-service experience that their users find Delight in using and so when we do that we want to start in the research and so we're very fortunate that at servicenow in our experience organization we have a large insights team that conducts research with our customers with our partners to understand Trends in a specific market and so as we think about the evolution of employee Center we do research on how employees expect to interact with their company when they need services and there are really three key themes that came out of that research that helped Drive how we think about best practices so the first one is anytime anywhere access I should be able to interact with HR or it facilities Etc if I'm at my desk if I'm on the subway if I'm on a bus if I'm in the cafeteria I shouldn't be restricted to only being able to interact with these service providers when I'm sitting at my desk plugged into the network I want flexibility in how I interact so mobile is very key in that experience I'm sure we're all hearing this a lot in that our consumer experiences our experiences with our smartphones and our dinner delivery services or vehicle ride sharing services are shaping the expectations that our employees have for interacting with I.T and other groups so we really need to up level our experiences to be as good if not better than those consumer experiences that people are interacting with inside and outside of work and ultimately for many reasons cost savings efficiency getting people back to work self-service is critical to the success of the businesses we all work for if you think about the reason somebody comes to employee center it's because typically it's because something is interrupting their ability to do the job they were hired for so the ability to self-serve and get back to work is critical to making sure people are doing what we're asking them to do when we hire them into our businesses next slide please now unfortunately there's some challenges that we continuously see as we embark on these self-service Journeys uh these five are very common one is hard to find content we often map Legacy content structures when we move from one platform to another we deal with politics and we're forced to design our content to map our org charts and employees employees especially new employees don't know those structures they don't know the jargon they don't know the lingo so they struggle to find content in these large taxonomies related to that is search relevancy is the ability to cert rather than browse using search to find content remember people typically have wonderful search experiences with Google and other platforms like Amazon or Ebay to find things they need those consumer experiences but for whatever reason because we don't invest the time search is not as good when we get into these self-serve Platforms in the workplace going even deeper and more specific we know a lot about our employees but we often don't use that to shape the experiences that they have when they come in to self-serve I'll tell one quick story I was working with a large retail chain and I logged into their portal impersonating a loss prevention specialist at a store in Connecticut and the first six catalog items he saw all had to do with access to sap you didn't even know what those initials stood for that that was what his first experience and impression of the self-service experience was at that retailer another challenge is as I interact with these digital tools if they don't use consistent language and consistent navigation I'm constantly having to reset my expectations my mental model would be the language we use in ux for how to interact with these platforms and that creates friction in my efficiency of getting work done and then ultimately one of the biggest challenges is confidence if you're asking me to self-serve but over and over again I submit a ticket and it disappears into a black hole I'm more likely to find other means of resolving my issue so low confidence and ticket fulfillment is a something that prevents adoption of self-service so these all generate a series of user needs please click and then ultimately Drive our best practices and you'll see each of these user needs crop up in the five best practices I'm about to review providing content that's easily discoverable helped me find information I need quickly personalize that content based on my role location department and job type and support easily in a consistent way whether I'm interacting at my desk on my phone on my tablet and then ultimately give me confidence that my issue is going to be resolved and that often comes from past experiences next slide please so the way I'm going to talk about each of these best practices is I'm going to State it I'm going to describe it and then in the content and I think you'll get this later I try and connect each best practice to actual capabilities on servicenow so that you have some guidance on how to act on these best practices so one of the most important things any customer can do as they move from Employee Service Center to employee Center where they move from some other platform to servicenow is understand how things are going today are users able to find content is a language we're using are there stale items in your catalog or knowledge base that aren't relevant how do you learn more about what is most frustrating to your users so it's not just new technology and that's exciting there's actually a dramatic Improvement in the experience you're delivering As you move to a new platform or capability like employee Center and you can see here there are a set of capabilities and this even can be updated more with user experience analytics to start under understanding how your employees your customers are using servicenow today to then drive decisions and priorities As you move on to the new platform next slide please if you look at some of the most successful consumer-facing companies like Amazon their website is not that beautiful it's overwhelming there's a ton of content I often don't know where to go now I can rely on search that's very reliable but what differentiates them from their competitors is that package arrives before I click submit I exaggerate but we all have that experience where we're like how did this get here so fast that's because they've invested millions of dollars in Acquisitions and process Improvement and Logistics to nail the service delivery part and that's where we need to focus not on the colors not on the fonts but actually on what happens when I click submit on a request to make sure that it goes through the process in the most efficient and effective way to get to the right team there's automation used Etc actually efficiently fulfill that request next slide please we also need to focus on making sure information finds a user we we talked about this earlier in some of the challenges and pain points but it's really critical that we leverage things like user criteria to say oh you're an accountant at our company these are typical catalog items that are relevant for you you are based in Israel so you can only pick from these this is a real experience I had when I started at service now before we started using user criteria I went to order my monitor as a remote employee and there were 15 monitors in the catalog 13 of them in the title had some country only in the pre in parentheses in the title so it'd say you know India only UK only so ultimately there are actually two monitors only two monitors I could order but I had to filter through that list of 15 even though the system knew all these things about me so it takes some effort and it takes some work to implement things like user criteria but it helps your users get back to their jobs faster because they're filtering through less content so that's something else that's very important next slide please in every content project I've worked on in my 15 years of doing ux this is one of the most challenging things because you're fighting egos here companies or VPS want their group name on the home page they want their special project in the catalog and that's great for their ego but it's not actually great for users getting their work done and again getting back to work so finding ways to understand how your users expect to navigate your content is really critical staying away from code names for special projects staying away from acronyms just like good content writing skills are also really important to helping your users find the content and get back to work as quickly as possible you have to remember that you're in a bubble when you're designing employee designing and creating this experience because you're living it but if you're at a large organization with thousands of employees those people don't even know what you're up to they're off doing their jobs they're you know fixing a pipe on an oil rig or restocking shelves on a in an aisle in a store they aren't learning all this special language that you get to learn as a special team working on this project so you can't let that stuff manifest in the actual experience next slide please and just like we talk about that in terms of naming content and using jargon we see this also being really important is how you ask for information from your users when you present a form as part of a catalog item or you're writing a knowledge article understand that information and skill and knowledge that the user is bringing to that form don't ask complicated questions that they don't have to save it's time where something might be easier for it to get ask things consistently um I remember I was looking at one customer's catalog at one point and in five different catalog items they asked for the user's user ID in different ways it was screen name it was user ID it was ntid from back in the Windows NT days and it was email address it was just these inconsistent ways of asking for something that technically the system already knew so there are ways in servicenow to try and enforce that consistency so if you want to make sure you always ask for an address in the same way create a variable set that can be reused across catalog items that's your address variable set and then you can start building consistency into your experience so this helps with consistency which we talked about earlier as a user need it also helps with users efficiently avoiding friction and quickly filling out and giving you accurate information because otherwise if they don't understand how to answer the question they're going to skip it if it's not required or guess and that's ultimately going to create more work for your service desk later it's really important to remember that your consumers your users don't have the expertise that your help desk does in it or your service desk team in HR has it's really critical to make sure that you get users feedback as well to see if you're doing well on this as you build out your catalog so we see that when you think about these five best practices as you're creating your content your knowledge your catalog items designing your self-service experience if you follow these you will have a more approachable more effective more desirable experience for getting your users back to doing their jobs once they come to employee Center because something is disrupted their day I will turn it over to Nicole to talk about some design thinking work we we do have a question which I think is oh absolutely so Abe is asking I struggle with the same issue as described in AJ's example of having 13 computer monitors listed with for X country only and scripting becomes very complicated to achieve this for all their needs um so maybe he's asking can user criteria be applied to Choice list on record producers to show a high Choice options um I don't know the answer that question I'm sure that's something we can look into the the way we handled it at servicenow was that each of those monitors were distinct catalog items and so the user criteria was applied to the catalog item there wasn't a single monitor catalog item with a choice list it was 13 different catalog items that each had appropriate user criteria for location exactly we're happy to follow up on this yeah that's the one that even I would have recommended like you know you create separate catalog items and you apply user criteria on that instead of complicating your form and having like a user criteria applied at Choice level um but we'll also follow up if there's any any other enhancement any other questions on these before we move on feel free to raise hand if you want to okay so Nicole over to you great um thank you again for having us uh what the studio does and this is going to be a kind of a brief introduction to really what design thinking is but basically what AJ was talking about around kind of getting into that consumer mindset with inside our organization I'm going to help you with maybe a couple of techniques if you're going to go to the next slide please um and what's called design thinking so I'm sure that you've heard of design thinking and maybe some of you have been practicing for a while but we like inside of um in our practice we like to call it a practice because design thinking really is like doing a yoga practice or anything else where you're doing something repetitively to kind of learn through and to be able to have more Tools in your toolbox so I'm going to give you a brief introduction to design thinking and then at the end we have some resources that might actually help you if you're interested in learning more about the practice or the journey so let's go to the next slide so we're calling this like design thinking 101 and the practice around design thinking um is really this in a nutshell so it's about going wide conver diverging and then getting more choices going complex and then narrowing down to make good decisions and when we do design thinking we like to do it with groups and you might already be doing this right now using an agile or agile practice within your groups but really this is the motion and it's a very simple concept and it's really um a more of a framework than anything else so this is what was called the diamond right this is what the the initial design thinking process is and service down and to make this up this is a practice that was actually developed in the 1970s in banking and has been used in technology for a long time so if we want to go to the next slide please foreign what happens in design thinking is that it's a Double Diamond so this is how we go through a process and this shrinks or expands and it's iterative as you go through but really it's about this idea that you go wide and you get a lot of things to make decisions then you define um those you vote you do things as a team to get to one place then you go wide again once you've made that decision to co-create what you're trying to work on then you'd vote on your favorite answers and then you narrow again and what it is is about a journey of going wide and narrow and wide and narrow so that all of those ideas can come out and as a group we're able to make good decisions so when we do design thinking work with customers we like to do it with about eight to ten you start to get a little we unwieldy when you get into the 20s but it's about you can make things happen it just means you might need a little bit more time because one of the most important things oops sorry was that question um what's really important in design thinking is that we are getting everybody's voice heard the democratization of ideas so that we can actually have good conversations about narrowing and move along the journey together so next slide please um why design thinking actually works is because it's round structured group thinking and that helps us gain alignment and because we're all working together and maybe somebody's that needs their idea to be heard they're heard but then we're all agreeing upon something to move forward and to move through the process and you might have been doing this already and I'll show you a a a technique and that's what that we're going to close out with but it's about gaining alignment what we always try to do is get diverse groups in the room so as we're talking about gaining alignment around a concept or an idea or moving forward like you're trying to reimagine something in your new employee experience you'll want to get different stakeholders in the room or different groups of people so you can get those diverse groups of people to kind of work together so that you get a better solution the more different types of people that we have in our engagements the better our Solutions are as a team and you're making Champions along your journey so that goes along with that organizational change management getting your employees voice into the actual process helps them Champion your experience moving forward by working the lean and by working quickly and iterating often you're grading that strategic Direction and saving time and money at the same time because we're not you know especially in a lean process you're testing prototypes before you go into those really heavy heavy development Cycles those are expensive so using things like AJ will be talking about later with card sorting getting those user feedback testing something and then iterating that's what we're talking about here in design thinking as well as that iterative model in lean ux so next slide please one of the this is a technique that you have access to that we've formatted for you for this particular um session but this is a technique that we use all the time and this one really is about kickstarting about gaining alignment about understanding what we've done so far so it's a really simple retrospective activity called anchors and wins and you may have already done this but you maybe didn't know what was the strategy behind it so I'm going to quickly walk through if we go to the next slide um oh it looks like we have a raised hand do we want to uh does somebody want to ask a question there yeah I think it was yeah let me just unmute allow the dog Peter you got it you should be able to unmute and talk I can't hear anything I'm sorry that was just an accident I have a question I apologize no worries no worries happy place for making mistakes so uh but do you have a question while you're here no I love this theme though I I came I in a different job I had a similar concept I've not seen it in print since then so this is great great so let's just I'll kind of walk you through this really simple exercise and what you can you'll find out is that really these exercises are about giving us the room to innovate sometimes it's really nice to give ourselves permission just to be able to think differently and not be so tied down to oh my god I've got to make this idea work this is so this is going to be have to be scaled right now let's just work on it lean test a concept get into theories say I have an idea let's work on it as a team let's iterate on it quickly so when we Sprint with a customer we use the Google design Sprint methodology and generally you're trying to get from idea to test in a week ours take a little bit longer because we've moved to remote but in general we are getting going from idea to a test something within six to eight weeks and that means about 20 hours of time so if you're working within your organization you can lean this up even more and do it even more quickly but it's about testing and getting this idea out so this alignment jam and there's a link to some videos on other teams using it a group called AJ and smart we use them as a resource all the time not our AJ that's up there but a different group out of Berlin this is one of those messes that we use all the time and there's lots of different versions of the same thing so it doesn't need to get stale there's anchors and winds using a boat metaphor but there's also another one at the end of this called Rosebud Thorn they're retrospectives they're just asking people for more information so we're using the same Double Diamond and in this um it's showing what a workshop would look like so I have here the workshop slide and then after that when we move through you'll actually see that there's the um the different activities that are listed in here but what this is doing is we'd like to get that diverse group of people and maybe this is about using your employee experience we want to create a better experience for our custom for our employees um and it's bringing that degree diverse groups of people together to say here um you know let's move to the next slide and you can actually see the anchors and wins activity itself you do a line and above the fold you're saying what's currently working in our employee experience so you get all of these different groups to actually put sticky notes in there not talk about it it's very very important that we work alone together that allows every person in the room to be able to come up with their ideas and thoughts and put it above the fold and then we do around Robin and we share and that's important too because what we really want to do is hear from their voice what they're saying and in that they'll usually say something different than what they're actually writing and we write that down we get that on the board so we sometimes cluster when we're talking about what's working because we don't want to get rid of everything that's working we want to make sure we're maintaining what's working and a lot of times in order to get um people talking it's much easier for them to kind of think slow down talk about what's working first then we go into the negative below the line what's actually holding us back from our goal so what's holding us back from having that great employee experience you get all of their thoughts from that too from there what we do is we organize and we cluster those into Concepts or different principles or different words so that we can kind of categorize that and then you from there what you do is you do the ideation phase so you go wide again you do ideas around how can we make you based on these themes how can we make it better so these are those Divergent and convergent cycles that come together and these are the activities I'm going to pause right there and see if there's any other if there's any questions on this little bit that I've talked about so far okay so what I'm going to do we can just kind of quickly walk through some of these other slides you can have access to them and as you will find out or as you will know it's like this may feel a little overwhelming but we've put everything in here to kind of write it out for you and once again this is we didn't make this up there's more activities at the end so this is about brain writing this is people working alone together on those sticky notes and kind of how that works next slide please um this is just how you know some how to's on how to Cluster and theme we can move to the next one we'll do these kind of quickly you'll have access to this this is one of the key things in design thinking is taking negative Concepts and moving them into a place for ideation or for us to be able to think so that's why it's on a converge when you take something negative and you turn it into a question that allows you opportunity that is gives people a space so you can say maybe one of your problems in your employee experience is we don't have visibility into the process let's just say then you say how might we create more visibility into our process so that's a nice wide question that'll allow us to be able to come up with lots of ideas sending emails having a pizza tracker you start to get into allow everybody to kind of think these are those places where no idea is bad you go wide every idea is good even if it seems silly Take It Wide let it go after that after everybody's had a chance to put on that green hat and to share then you can start narrowing on ideas not bash other people's ideas just narrow on the ones that you think are going to be the most successful so these techniques are going to help move them forward and they're not easy so there's a practice of even learning how to write a good how might we not too wide not too narrow those kind of things and what I do with my family is we actually use a lot of these techniques when we're just trying to do things around the house plan a vacation we might do an anchors and wins based on what worked on our last vacation what would we love to have happen on our next vacation those kind of things so any of these retrospective activities gives us a chance to be able to practice this uh at home and that gives us the confidence to do it in front of your peers or in your workspace do it in safe places first so let's go through the next exercise um and selection grids so selection grids you can use for all kinds of things and that's really just making two accesses and then like we do impact over effort and you then you'll be able to start to put all these great ideas what's going to be have the most effort or sorry have the most effort and the least amount of impact you just want to get rid of those ideas like don't even worry about them but what actually is going to have a lot of impact and it's going to be hard sometimes those are those wow ideas that maybe need to plan out some of those ones that are going to be easy and have a huge impact those are those High Roi moments that you as a team are deciding let's do these first to get our low hanging fruit while we plan these wow moments it kind of helps us organize so there's lots of ways and you can find online different criterias to put on those XY access when you're organizing these thoughts but then it allows us not to be focusing on any one idea but as it team which is going to work really well and you can't one trick to these you cannot let a sticky note overlap so you can't have two things that are in that high high moment or you just have to make sure that there nothing overlaps you have to make decisions so if we go to the next one this is another one of those activities I threw it in here because I think it's really really helpful as we get to the end of projects I love to do a rosebud Thorn or something just to figure out what working what's not working what we'd like to continue and if you're working agile you use this methodology at the end of your Sprints this is it the exact same thing but it's really that idea that we need to always take a step back after we do a plot project no matter how fast or how slow to really understand how what we've learned and how we want to move forward um that's it for the activities and if you want to go to the next slide these are really just kind these are just some of the principles the design thinking supports finding the right problems ideating creating lots of ideas democratizing your ideas and then prototyping and iterating quickly we love prototyping and get feedback on paper before you start get something out in front of those employees to even prove that your hypothesis is going to work think of it as science and it's fun and then you'll be able to start moving forward a little faster and you're not so tied to your own ideas being perfect um every single time so if we want to move to the next slide I'm rushing through I want to make sure AJ has enough time so oh there's an animation and click on that one when do you use this keep going um once again this gives us better alignment maybe it's on our workspaces on what's working what's not working we can focus it into a specific workflow these can be as wide as you want them or as narrow but you know that the answers are based on how you frame the problem and the theme of that Workshop um I say do this anytime you can do does design thinking at the beginning of a process to kick start it when you're reimagining when you're trying to solve something really tight uh and then the last slide for my part of this is a list of some of the resources that we love so this is about service design check out these resources right in the middle is AJ and smart they do the Google design Sprint methodology with Jake Knapp the author from Google and what they do is there's these training modules they've got great videos just to kind of get you into some of these activities these are some of the other resources that I thought maybe it might be fun to look through but these are a lot of the resources that we use on a day-to-day basis to find new activities to do with teams that have that Divergent and convergent philosophy so we can keep our activities up to date and interesting with our teams so that's it for me thank you so much any questions thanks Nicole any anyone has any question on design thinking or the techniques that Nicole was presenting okay Nicole is still around for the um for the rest of the presentation so please ask your questions in Q a panel and uh let's start diving deep into the taxonomy piece of it um to begin with I do want to just you know come back to the thought that what is the taxonomy it is often not very clear for organizations and what exactly is the purpose for this taxonomy so the purpose for the unified taxonomy is to create an employee-centric browse experience and I the example that I often use is if you are going to uh let's say a big Supermarket the way you navigate your Shoppers is not necessary based on how you are stalking the store it is based on what they have in their mind when they are searching for for things to buy so for example if the Shopper is searching for let's say they have a dish in their mind like I want to make pasta your pasta aisle should have everything related to Pasta everything from utensils to ready-made pasta to ingredients and so on and that's not how you would potentially Source or stock your stock your store for all these different things the same way your taxonomy is how employee is searching for Content whether that is a catalog item article sourced by it or HR or anyone who is fulfilling that service they don't have all these different categories in mind they are thinking I need help with benefits or I need help with hardware and and so on so use the taxonomy from that frame and this is very separate from how your knowledge categories or service categories would be because those categories are more for how you're stalking the store or how you are creating that content we do ship an out-of-box taxonomy and we highly encourage organizations especially those who do not have the time to invest in a brand new or a completely specific uh taxonomy for your organization use the out-of-box taxonomy as a starting point we've done a lot of research to make sure the terminology is used in it are um there's a 70 to 30 percentage 70 there where employees um are using um to find content so start with the out-of-box taxonomy it's something that we highly recommend now when it comes to the process or the best practice process for creating your taxonomy the first step is understand what are we are delivering out of box um and and then we recommend doing a mapping exercise or to identify the gaps or topics that you may need to rename create or modify to align with how your organizational terminology works so this mapping exercise is typically on one side you need to have your categories in the other side you pick up your out-of-boxed taxonomy and you're literally saying this knowledge category or this content item can fit in this topic and you're just doing it across all your content foreign now if if you do not find that out-of-box taxonomy aligns with your organizational terminology or um the taxonomy also essentially creates the verbage that you want organizations to think about uh sorry employees to think about when they think about their experience with the organization so a lot of organizations like to align the taxonomy with the culture in fact even if you think about the servicenow internal portal we have terminology around grow um as one of the topics so um it's it's very much aligned with how we are thinking about um um our own culture internally so if you are thinking of a new taxonomy there are a couple of techniques that we will walk you through um one is card sorting exercise and a tree test which we recommend you to do um to ensure that the taxonomy that you're creating um aligns with how your employees are thinking about or using um to navigate through the portal and ultimately no taxonomy is meant to be static forever we we should review and evolve the taxonomy every one to two years in fact currently we are in the process of evolving the out-of-box taxonomy that we have shipped it's been a year since the portal is out we have employee Center is out and we have done a lot added a lot more use cases on the out-of-box employee Center portal which which makes the case that you know the taxonomy needs to align with what where the portal is heading so that is true in your environment as well as you start doing more with the portal as more employees start using the portal you want to think about how the taxonomy should evolve um based on where your culture is going where the use cases are and so on any questions on this okay so I'm going to hand it over to AJ to walk us through the the techniques that I was talking about for coming up with your own taxonomy thanks Puja so we think back to Nicole's language around the Double Diamond and diverging and converging these two activities fit nicely into that model so the first thing is if we are saying out of the box taxonomy doesn't fit our organizations content or we're bringing in a new group of content of out of the box taxonomy hasn't considered card sorting is a great way to understand how your users actually think the content should be organized there are a couple different ways to conduct card sorts there's ways to do them in person with actual post index cards and physically sorting them into groups very manual effort uh require some work to document the way in which people group them and there's been software-based tools that have filled that Gap to reduce some of the friction and I mentioned some of them on this page here so that you can conduct your card sorting online now that doesn't mean you shouldn't to do some of those sessions moderated where you're sitting next to the participant and actually watching how they organize the content because when you do them moderate it you have an opportunity to ask questions to ask them to narrate out loud what they're thinking and really start to learn more about your users that may inform other decisions you make down the road but because many card sorting decisions are made based on quantitative data you want volume you want a lot of participants to go through so you can also send out a link and invite people via email to add that data layer that kind of statistical significant level of data to make decisions about how to organize your content and all these tools have analytics platforms as well so that you can analyze the results of your card sort but it's a really valuable way to get your users mental model of the breadth of content and how they might group them you can do a closed card sort where you define the categories they can put content in you can do an open card store to learn how they might name the groups the slight variations in the process it's a really valuable tool to get insights into how you might organize those content items once you have a proposed taxonomy next slide please the way to validate that this taxonomy is going to work is through an activity called tree testing and tree testing again like card sorting has technology tools software tools in the cloud that allow you to run these studies and the goal here is to say here's my proposed taxonomy here's a set of proposed tasks I expect my users to go through within this content organization are they successful in doing it if I only have them look at the taxonomy so you're not judging the design of your employee Center you're not judging your fonts or your color choice you can see in the screenshot on the right you're really just navigating the names of the categories of the topics from the top level all the way down to see if they successfully find the right answer to complete that said task hopefully you have high success and that gives you confidence to for your rollout but if you identify the task that keeps failing what you might see in the data is everybody goes down the same wrong path and I might say oh okay maybe this item is organized into the wrong category so now you start converging on a specific taxonomy by getting validation from your users we at servicenow use a product called muiq from a group called measuring usability that has all the ways in which we need to send it out to invite people to do a tree test to analyze the results but there are other products out there like tree Jack from optimal Workshop uh user Zoom usertexting.com I think may even have tree testing and card sorting tools as well so there's a plethora of options in this space the point is get user feedback as you are building something for users it's cheaper to get it early than when you're done and you have to redo the whole site these these are tools to help you build confidence in what you plan on implementing awesome thank you AJ thanks also wanted to give you an example of like our own pre-test that we are doing to evolve the out-of-box taxonomy so um everything like you know AJ was saying is is how we have followed it we created a we did a card sorting exercise to come up with our new taxonomy that we are testing Now using a tree test and the place that I want to highlight is if you would see on the right hand side we identified a set of use cases that we want to test in the tree test so that's that's one of what an important exercise as well like you need to know what your important use cases are um and and make sure you're testing those in the retest anything you want to add on this AJ uh on this slide yeah and so one thing that came up in I think the Q a and irritability test so usability of the tree tasks and that you may use the same tasks but now you're actually having them navigate through the actual web application um Nicole earlier talked about prototyping and doing mock-ups you can run usability testing on a mock-up in a design tool like we use figma at servicenow and you can build a clickable mock-up again it's cheaper than building the whole web application and then finding out it doesn't work right so these tasks here are very common uh employee Center tasks that an employee might go to you can imagine asking users or participants in a usability study to do the same thing um but actually navigating the website and observing any issues they run into they can't read something because the font's too small they may have a navigation issue the form might not be intuitive that stuff starts coming out in a usability study that wouldn't come out in a tree test awesome thanks AJ um before we take additional questions I do want to highlight some of the resources one is we have a workbook so if you are looking to use the out-of-box taxonomy and you want to you know start mapping it but with your content we have a taxonomy workbook which is linked over here and it's part of our now create resources and then there are a couple of different articles that AJ has published around usability testing and taxonomy development that we would highly recommend you to Leverage all right so let me just look at the Q a manual and see if there's any that we can answer live um okay so Matt is asking when using easy Pro is it recommended to have a separate taxonomy for hrsd or does it preferred to integrate HR into a single main taxonomy so our stance is that you should always have a single main taxonomy there are often things that you may associate as a service provider being part of HR but the employee is going somewhere else to search for it so um you want to have um you could essentially have if you see an out-of-box we do have a parent topic which says HR but the idea is it is still a single main taxonomy and you can have content that is part of hrst appear in other topic areas as well so you can have one content item mapped to multiple topics so have a single main taxonomy and and have all your other departments who are offering services to the employees be part of that single main taxonomy foreign Mark do you want to just go off mute and ask your question let me see you should be able to do that now hi hello there it's Mark speaking um yeah I just uh put a bit more technical question in the in the Q a and it's concerning the connected content because when you are working with connected content um in a live instance you would do that directly in uh in production uh but that actually causes uh yeah potential issues and I was wondering if that can be um yeah addressed with the development team well the what we recommend is um you when you are experimenting with your taxonomy use the sub-production environment and to like do the experimentation in terms of what topics work whatever you would want your content um and when you move it to production you can use an update set to move it or or do that mapping in in production as well typically the content that we have seen is to be different in both the environments sometimes so we don't want like the same mapping to be like just replicated in production but yeah we've heard of this and uh um there's a reason why we have that currently um um but yeah I'll share that feedback anyway um there is also one enhancement that is coming in February and a couple of questions I saw were related to that um in our February store release it will be tied with Utah family release you will be able to associate new content that is published in a category connected to a topic and automatically see that appear on the on the topic management page and it's almost like in the related link section you would see there's new content available and the topic managers will be able to review the new content and then add it to the topic if it makes sense so that whole process of making sure your topics are completely updated as the content is being created at the back end we are simplifying that process do you have any recommendations on how many different taxonomy areas to link a request item can you have too many from a usability standpoint and how do you determine the main taxonomy area versus the secondary areas so I think what you're asking is how do we determine which one is a parent topic versus a subtopic and um how many uh topic I should a request item be linked into so the an AJ add to my answer I think um the main thing that you would use to determine whether something is a topic sorry versus the subtopic is the tree test yeah so I'm trying to think about these two questions so if you have a single item that gets connected to multiple different taxonomy areas for the purpose of a user finding that one item in that one moment that's probably fine but what it does a poor job of is educating the user of where to expect things so if I find item a in 12 different categories it doesn't really teach me anything about where I should expect items like item a so that would be the risk there it's kind of abstract because the average user is probably not on employee Center very often um so I don't know if there's like don't do more than two but I would I would not suggest having a single item in many topics unless it is directly relevant to those topics um because it becomes a nightmare to maintain I feel like and it just doesn't educate them of of really defining concretely that this topic is going to have this type of items and this topic is going to have these other type of items so it feels like a slippery slope more than anything Amisha on the second question around the main taxonomy area versus secondary secondary areas the card sort is going to be the best technique I would say versus guessing of how your users might organize content then you could do a card sort with multiple layers of categories it becomes a little more complicated but if you see them building groups in the card sort that are very big you can ask them to subdivide that's what I would do if I was facilitating a session and then the tree test would be used to validate that you got the taxonomy correct so that's how those would fit into that that answer foreign we are almost up on time but if there's any other question feel free to raise your hand and we can take it but other than that thank you so much everyone I hope this was helpful we will have the recording and the slides posted on community and YouTube soon and uh a really big thank you to AJ and Nicole for running this session for us thanks so much for having us thank you in the session yet I'm answering a couple more questions yep yep yep please and if anyone else has questions please put it in Q a panel we are here for a few more minutes for those of you that don't feel like you had your question fully answered or we've been having a really interesting back and forth post it to community so you can get perspectives from your colleagues and other customers and we'd be happy to weigh it so Abby on your whole conversation around um naming catalog items that are unique to countries but the same item I'd love to see you post that to community and then we can dive into this conversation further and I would suggest to anybody else who doesn't feel like they have their question answered we're going to be keeping an eye on the community foreign