Let’s Get this Party Started
I’d been working for GlideFast for about a year when I finally got my act together and joined the SN Devs slack channel. As it did when I started with GlideFast, my name raised a few eyebrows.
“Interesting last name you have there.”
“That? oh yeah…picked it up a few years back.”
Or something like that. Not because I’m some amazing developer that’s been on the platform for years. Just by proxy, as the wife of Travis Toulson.
In truth, I’ve been watching over Travis’ shoulder for years now, silently judging his font choices and not-so-silently providing feedback on his portal designs when asked. After one-too-many over-complicated WordPress jobs, he reeled me in with his siren’s song: “This is easier on Service Portal.”
So what business do I, a total newbcakes, have starting a ServiceNow blog?
Well, since beginning this journey, I’ve noticed two things:
First, while many of my fellow developers can code circles around me, I’ve had more than a few admit their reluctance to touch anything front-end or design related. For many of them, portal just isn’t their thing, and they don’t want it to be. Integrations, mid servers, and script includes? They’ve got it covered. But colors and font choices? No thank you. (On the other hand, I would rather stick a hot coal in my eye socket than deal with integrations, and have so much appreciation for those of you that bear that burden so I don’t have to.)
Second, I’ve noticed that while there are many, many resources to help out fellow developers with complex code-related things, there are very few that assist with the design concepts that can make or break the success of a Service Portal experience. From my little corner of the ServiceNow universe, I’m happy to share the knowledge I have.
So, what would you find of interest here?
In short, I’ll do my best to provide four things:
Design inspiration, for those of you looking for yet another way to show off a list of incidents,
Design principles, if you want to understand what makes a good user experience and why it’s important,
Widget code and styles you can use, if you want to find code that gets that certain look and feel JUST how you’re imagining it in your mind. And finally,
Resources: I have my own bag of tricks including pages I frequent, books I refer to, etc. and I am happy to share these with you.
Ultimately, my hope is that my readers walk away from this blog with a higher comfort level with design principles and topics that will equip them to provide their organizations and clients with amazing front-end experiences that encourage user adoption.
And well, if I can turn a few of you into fellow font snobs, all the better. Muahahahaha.
So who’s this for anyway?
This is for the ServiceNow developers. Both the ones new to the game and the ones that have spent 20 years in IT. You’re busy, you have deadlines to meet, and it can take forever to nail down a portal design from scratch (I have in the past spent over six hours just deciding fonts for a portal). Maybe you’ve slain your script include dragons and you’re looking to expand your skill set into Service Portal. Maybe your team is lacking someone to manage your company’s portal and you volunteered (or were voluntold). Either way, I’m sharing what I know in hopes that it will make your job easier.
This is for our end users. In turn, I’m writing so we can better serve the people that actually submit that Service Catalog request by providing experiences that help them get what they need and get on with their day. If they’re comfortable with their experience on ServiceNow, it helps us all succeed.
This is for the designers. The design industry is changing. We are now more problem solvers than “makers of pretty things” (though the things you guys make are gorgeous and I’m jealous for it ‘cause I can’t draw for crap). The ServiceNow platform is a fantastic opportunity to create solutions for some of the biggest brands in the world. I want to bridge the gap between the designers out there in the universe and this platform where design skills are increasingly in need. And finally,
This is for the 15(ish) percent. The very small percentage of ServiceNow developers that happen to be women. You inspire me, and I hope my voice honors the amazing work you’re doing out there.
So how can you be involved?
Got questions or something you’d like to see me cover? Want to show off your work? Want to suggest a better style or way of doing things? Let me know by contacting me here.
I’ve also been encouraged to live stream some of my coding / designing / etc, which I’ll announce on LinkedIn. Which is cool if you want to see me with 20 CSS Tricks browser tabs open. That’ll take place on Twitch.
And of course, I’ll enjoy hearing what you think of the content I post. I’ll leave commentary for LinkedIn.
In Closing…
If you’ve made it this far, there’s hope for me. By Knowledge 2021, I’d like to have posted at least every other week, with something in each of the content areas I mentioned above (client work and all that allowing, as this is after-hours for me). On top of that, I want to give this site a more robust design. For now, I knew that simple was better, as a complete site redesign would hold up the content I’m wanting to deliver. So from here, we’ll see where it goes.