Perfect storm of abysmal design/UX used to represent a bloated and confusing underlying information architecture. It's possible that I'm using an poorly configured version/instance of the product, but good lord, I'll do anything I can to avoid using it at work.
It’s slow.
It’s rarely clear which button you need to advance a workflow.
Some buttons take irreversible actions, others lead to further information, and these two types of buttons look identical.
The point about a confusing underlying information architecture is spot-on.
Pages can have multiple tabbed sections which is disorienting.
The approval interface makes it very unclear what you are approving without looking it up elsewhere yourself.
You have to right click on a column header to find the export to Excel option?
Asterisk apparently means ‘contains’ when searching, unlike search syntax in any other product.
No apparent way to search all fields in a list - you have to choose which field specifically to search in.
URLs are long and ugly.
Users are displayed as FirstName LastName, which is friendly and all but there is no way to disambiguate when two users share the same name but have a different User ID - and clashes like these happen all the time in my company of >100k employees.
I’ve no idea how much of this is fundamental to the product and how much is the fault of our configuration. There may be useful features of which I am unaware, but the UI does not invite discovery of these if they are there.
Your points are super valid, and your last sentence resonates with me heavily. It’s the essence of what my team is focused on improving. Our out-of-box should be as close to ‘great’ as possible. This goes for the most technical implementors, admins, devs... all the way down to non-technical single-app users. A great platform will know how to do this gracefully without forcing the latter through the same experience.
Going to bring these, as well as the other points in the thread, up in my staff meeting next week. It’s relevant to the work we’re currently doing.
I find basic tasks challenging in your app. A support agent escalates to developers (i.e. me). "Hey, can you look at INC123456". The ticket is not yet assigned to me. How do I find and open this ticket? The support agent can send me a direct link, but there's no apparent relation between any of the query params and the ticket number, and also no obvious UI element in which I can put a ticket number and navigate there. When I navigate to the ticket, comments are mixed in with audit entries. The frame based navigation also means I get questions from junior devs on tickets and they copy links into slack messages that just send me to the homepage.
Definitely going to bring this into my discussion with other design leaders next week.
But yeah ServiceNow is insane. Not sure how much of this is product itself or gajillion of customizations.
