Service Portal vs Platform UI vs Service Catalog

[T Pappu]

Hi all,

I have been building a ServiceNow using Now platform and its UI. Realized that a better UI/UX can be delivered using Service Catalog  / Service Portal.

Can anyone recommend if there are best practices in terms of when to use Platform UI vs Service Catalog vs Service Portal? Is it driven by customer requirements?

Any insights would be helpful.

Thanks,

TK

[Robert Fedoruk]

It isn't an either / or situation.  Not even a little bit.  It's like asking which is better:  birds or corduroy.

[Giles Lewis]

Service Catalog is functional capability more than a UI. Customers order things. When they submit the form it triggers a workflow. The workflow may contain tasks, approvals, etc. etc.

If the capabilities of the Service Catalog meet your business requirements, then that is the way you go. Service Catalog is fast to implement and generally easy to support. You can deliver the Service Catalog via the Platform UI or the Service Portal UI. These days most people use the Service Portal because it looks nicer.

However, there are many situations where the Service Catalog will not meet your business requirements.  If you have worked with it then you know that its capabilities are limited. And other out-of-box modules such as Incident, Problem, Change, Project Mgmt, Agile Development, CSM, etc. etc. also may not meet your requirements. Every module in ServiceNow is designed to solve a specific business problem.  If your business problem is not one of these, then you may need to develop a custom application. You can deliver your custom application using one of two UIs: Platform UI or Service Portal.

So there are two user interfaces. Two user experiences. Platform and Service Portal.

The Platform UI is a lot less work. Orders of magnitude less work. It is fast and simple and easy to support.

But the problem with the Platform UI is that you cannot really control the user experience. If it is just a bunch of IT folk entering tickets, then it is no big deal. But when you are dealing with customers, user experience becomes really important. You cannot train customers on how to use the system, so you need to design the user interface so that it is really intuitive, and they can figure it out themselves without any help. In this situation it is worth going to the extra time and expense of using Service Portal to design a UI that is elegant and simple to use.

[T Pappu]

Thanks Giles.

Your explanation makes sense. My situation is something like that where the requirements are not specific to incident/task, so i have to design a custom application. When it comes to user experience, I noticed that the platform UI's look and feel options are limited.  So I started working on Record Producer but noticed that the designing of a record producer using containers is very time consuming and it looks like i might have to recreate the client scripts and all the business rules (not sure yet) i recreated in platform UI again. Then, maybe redo the same thing again in Service Portal, hence asked the question on the best approach.

Regards,

TK

[Jeff Currier]

My rule of thumb is Service Portal for the majority of end users, i.e. the masses and the Platform UI for power users who need to do more reporting, more constant updates, etc.  Service Catalog can be used in either, but I typically think of it as a subcomponent of the Service Portal.

The platform UI is better for power users who need to see more fields as well as want and need to do more complex functions.  The Service Portal is best when it is simple and quick.

To that point the interface missing in your title is mobile.  I feel that the mobile interface will continue to b e used by more and more people to get work done in ServiceNow.  Much of this activity will be the same as what end users do in the Service Portal, but some power users will also use mobile especially for approvals, quick status checks, reassignment and when work requires them to be away from their desks.