Københavns Kommune
Duration
6 months
My role
Lead Designer
Completed
2023
Technology
ServiceNow
Problem statement
Københavns Kommune originally came to Devoteam wanting to migrate their old ServiceNow portal to a newer version, as maintanance on the old version was being discontinued by ServiceNow. As they were facing a large remodel of the backend part of the portal, they were curious to see if upgrading the frontend would have a positive effect on productivity as well.
Challenges
Being the largest workplace in Denmark, with over 45.000 employees, one of Københavns Kommunes biggest challenges was the difference in tech literacy amongst employees. The portal contained large amounts of information about complex hardware or software – information that was crucial for one type of employee, but too complex for other types of employees. Secondly, the team behind the portal had failed to delegate ownership over different parts of the portal, resulting in multiple people inputting different information in different ways, compromising consistency.
Getting started
To begin gathering insights for the upcoming projects, we established two groups of test users – one group (“IT people”) with high tech literaty, and one group (“non-IT people”) with low to medium tech literacy.
Our main objective, in the beginning, was to clean up and create a new structure in the large catalogue of services and equipment, that the users could order from the portal. The catalogue had grown out of proportion, and there was no longer a clear overview of what it contained. The different catalogue items was described in different kinds of lingo, had varying levels of details and some had multiple duplicates.
A neat service catalogue was the foundation pillar on which we wanted to build the rest of the portal on, which is why we began our work here. Through interviews, workshops, card sorting and multiple rounds of testing, we slowly created new categories, sub-categories and groups that more intuitively categorized the more than 200 items on the portal.
Look and feel
When it came to designing the frontend, ServiceNow already offers a complete package of frontend design to cover all features. In the beginning, we just “dressed up” the ServiceNow frontend in Københavns Kommunes colors and fixed the font.
However, the HR department in KK recently had their portal redone, and we quickly realised that the users had become to used to the HR portals look and feel, that they reacted very negatively to the “simpler” design of the IT portal.
Having a somewhat small budget, we didn’t have the option to make a 1:1 duplicate of the HR portal. We had to be smart about implementing certain key elements of the HR portal, that would help create recognition and the feeling of consistency for the users.
We implemented elements such as buttons, input fields, filters and columns that matched the ones on the HR portal, but in the IT color scheme. The response quickly became much more positive, and not many users noticed that the portals were not exactly alike.
Design System and communication guidelines
To ensure that the newfound consistency in both visuals and language was enforced and maintained, we created a set of reusable design components in a design system, and also a set of clear communication guidelines for the team behind the portal.
In both cases, we gave clear instructions on what to do and what not to do, when creating new catalogue items or knowledge articles on the portal. We created both sets of guidelines together with the team from KK, to make sure the guidelines were realistic and achievable for them.
Launch
As of July 2024, the project is still under development and has yet to launch.