ServiceNow app development
The goal of this article is to introduce the service management domain and ServiceNow app development to a newcomer. It is a collection of public resources and tips. I would like to encourage you to comment with your own ideas.
Service Management is an exciting domain that exceeds designing for digital and physical products. It focuses on the holistic experience of a customer (CX — Customer Experience) or a company employee (EX — Employee Experience). In our day-to-day practice, we design, develop, and maintain digital products that serve both our customers and service teams. We do all of this at the scale of an enterprise environment with the highest expectations on security requirements and an intricate map of various system integrations. The user interaction channels might vary and typically involves Emails, Web portals, Backstage Workspaces, Chatbots and mobile apps.
Product vs. Service
The line between the Product and Service is often blurry, and our success is measured through the success of the service.
Imagine yourself having a frustrating experience with food delivery where the food ended up being swapped, costing you money, and leaving you hungry. I bet the last thing you think of is “but the app was good.”
ServiceNow ecosystem
Some companies deploy ServiceNow as a fixed feature-set platform with out-of-the-box modules. We aspire to bring the best experience to our customers and often integrate ServiceNow with other best-of-breed systems. This puts a lot of emphasis on our Platform knowledge and insights — are we re-inventing something already available? Are we planning to develop a feature that is already on the product roadmap?
To enter the ServiceNow world, I recommend starting with the Knowledge video library. If you are a Product Manager or Product Designer, I recommend dedicating part of your future professional learning to the platform knowledge. There is plenty of available learning and certification courses available once you get access to the environment.
Design Guidelines
Underlying principles of a good design practice are the same for B2C, B2B, enterprise software, or a public website. But the execution within ServiceNow ecosystem might be fundamentally different.
Blogosphere
ServiceNow is a vital platform with extensive development and partner ecosystem. Signing up to the developer community forum is an essential first step when exploring the platform. Another source of insights is an independent blog ecosystem from expert ServiceNow consultants and developers. This is my go-to default list I recommend watching regularly.
- Developer Community
- WomenNow
- AshleySN
- ServiceNow Ninjas
- Andrew Pishchuling
- Jace Benson
- Developer Advocate blog
- AJ
Twittersphere
I created a Twitter list with interesting people and companies to watch, ServiceNow included. If you are a Twitter person, I encourage you to watch other enterprise companies such as Box Developers, Microsoft Design or even Salesforce. They are all a major source of inspiration about what is happening in the world of enterprise software.
