Background

ServiceNow delivers digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. The company is constantly trying to solve customer problems, and release new versions of the software every 6 months with new features and fixes. However, the current upgrade process is extremely painful and requires a lot of technical efforts from customers. The purpose of this project was to ease customer pain points while upgrading the software.

Problem

Due to the complexity of the process customers can take up to 3 months to upgrade their software. And because of how time-consuming this process is, an average customer only upgrades every 1-2 years. This leads to a lot of maintenance effort from the company’s side because they have to support several different version throughout the year. And customers don’t benefit from the new features, which could resolve their issues.

Goals

ServiceNow has the opportunity to improve upgrades by announcing public release dates, creating personalized content, giving transparency & context, providing an impact preview, and developing a guided upgrade wizard.

Customers want to know when a release is available, what has changed, why it has changed, where they will be impacted, and how to accomplish it.

Pain Points

The first step of my design process was to analyze existing research and get to the root of the problem. Usability researchers had spent weeks conducting interviews and brainstorming sessions to come up with the main pain points in upgrading softwares.

Customers’ upgrade pains boil down to 5 basic questions -

1. WHEN is the release available?

2. WHAT has changed?

3. WHY did it change (and why does it matter)?

4. WHERE will it hurt me?

5. HOW do I manage it?

Solving the Problem

Screen Flow

Even though researchers and engineers had a business solution in mind, it did not necessarily align with the user flows. A big part of this project was to figure out what is the customers’ journey and at target their decision points. I spent a couple of days going through existing research and had brainstorming sessions to come up with a screen-flow that closely reflects user journey.

One of the key issues with designing for this project is that no 2 ServiceNow’s customers have the same issues. And we not only cater to our customers, we also have to keep in mind our customers’ customer. This makes designing a lot harder as we don’t have a target user, and have to play a balancing act between catering to the majority and edge cases.

Wireframes

Once I had a clear understanding of the screen-flows, I moved on to developing solutions for the customers’ pain points.

Pain Point 1: WHEN is the release available?

Pain Point 2 & 3: WHAT has changed? WHY did it change (and why does it matter)?

Pain Point 4 & 5: WHERE will it hurt me? HOW do I manage it?

Interface iterations

Even though most Wizards have the same base concept, I had to constantly reiterate the interface to match the brand’s identity and solve customer’s pain points. I went through multiple rounds of iterations and design reviews to work to develop the final product.

Iteration 1

Iteration 2

Usability Study

We ran 5 user interviews with various customers to get their feedback on the whole experience -

After taking the usability feedback into consideration, we realized that most users got the process and would use this to upgrade their software. However, the body copy and titles on each page had to be adjusted to be more descriptive and closer to user journey.

Final Prototype

With the help of a copy writer, I updated the final design. The project is currently under production and would be tested with a small set of user by the end of 2019.