Designing guided tours
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Summary of Designing guided tours
Designing guided tours in ServiceNow helps you create interactive walkthroughs that train users on features or tasks within your instance. These tours can provide detailed UI descriptions or step-by-step instructions to perform activities such as creating incidents or navigating the Service Portal.
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Planning a guided tour
- Define the purpose: Decide if the tour is for feature introduction or task completion, which affects the content and structure.
- Choose availability: Production instances suit daily task tours, while non-production instances are ideal for training without affecting live data.
- Name your tour clearly: Use unique, intuitive names like “Create a New Incident” to convey the tour’s goal to users.
- Assess user knowledge: Tailor descriptions based on what users are expected to know, ensuring clarity for all skill levels.
- Personalize instructions: Avoid errors such as duplicate entries by guiding users to input unique values during tasks.
- Plan navigation: Decide the starting page, critical steps, and navigation flow between steps.
Guided tour example
A sample tour for the Service Portal home page includes:
- Tour name: Service Portal Overview
- Goal: Help users understand key navigation elements
- Steps highlighting major UI components like search bar, ordering items, knowledge base, support options, profile access, and logo navigation
- Use of callouts with instructional text and “Next” buttons to guide progression
Selecting triggers
- Use Next button trigger for feature exploration tours.
- For task-oriented tours involving data entry:
- Use Next button or Change Element Value triggers to advance after user input.
- Avoid triggers that open lookup windows, as this ends the tour prematurely.
- Right-click and Mouse-over triggers can be used for descriptive tours to explain UI behaviors, though they may disrupt flow.
Using callouts
- Callouts must be placed directly on the target UI element, which highlights in blue when selected.
- For forms with tabs, instruct users to open tabs before continuing if necessary.
- Minimize callouts on fields with dynamic content to avoid tour interruptions from page refreshes.
- When involving pop-up windows, place callouts on the originating page and guide users within the text, since callouts cannot appear on pop-ups.
- Standard callout colors are static, but you can customize callouts in Service Portal for consistent branding and user experience.
Auto-launching tours
You can configure tours to auto-launch on a user's first visit to a page. Multiple tours can be sequenced to launch on successive visits, enabling introductory and progressively advanced training experiences.
Use these tips to help you create effective guided tours for your users.
Planning a guided tour
Before you begin outlining the details of a guided tour, answer the following questions.
- What is the purpose of the tour? Do you want to use callouts that provide detailed user interface descriptions so your users can better understand the feature? Or do you want the user to learn how to perform a task, such as how to create a new incident? It is important that you consider these questions and perhaps do some research before you begin to plan the tour so that you can properly break down the overall objective into discrete steps.
- Where should the tour be available? If you intend to guide your users to complete tasks that they might perform daily, such as ordering an item from the Service Catalog or creating an incident, it makes sense to make the tour available on your production instance. If you intend to train users to explore these tasks without creating actual records in the system, consider making the tour available on a non-production instance for training purposes instead. Both scenarios are valid.
- What should you name your tour? When you create a tour, you are prompted to provide a tour name. The name must be unique and intuitive so your users can understand the purpose of the tour. For example, use “Create a New Incident” or “Review the Incident List” as possible tour names.
- What assumptions are you making regarding what the user already knows about the page or task? Do all users who can take the tour have the same level of understanding? Use this information to decide how much description to provide at the beginning of the tour so that any user who takes the tour understands the content.
- If the purpose of the tour is to perform a task, how can you personalize the instructions so that each user who takes the tour creates a different record? For example, if the tour walks users through creating a group called Facilities, you can prevent subsequent users from getting a duplicate name error by instructing them in a callout to assign a unique value to the group Name field.
In planning your tour, you can also address these additional questions.
- What page should the tour start on?
- What steps are important to accomplishing the objective?
- How should a user navigate from one step to the next?
Guided tour plan
Review the following sample plan for a guided tour whose objective is to explore the Service Portal home page.
Note this key information you will need to provide and the fields values you will use as
you create a guided tour.
- Tour Name: Service Portal Overview
- Goal: Users should have a good understanding of how to navigate key elements of the Service Portal home page
- Portal Name: Service Portal
- Starting Page: Service Portal: ID Index
- Roles: All
| Step | Callout | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction |
|
Next button |
| 1 |
|
Next button |
| 2 |
|
Next button |
| 3 |
|
Next button |
| 4 |
|
Next button |
| 5 |
|
Next button |
| 6 |
|
Next button |
| 7 |
|
Next button |
| 8 |
|
Next button |
| Conclusion | Text: Congratulations! Now you have a general understanding of the Service Portal home page. | Click Complete to end the tour. |
Selecting triggers
If the purpose of the tour is to introduce your users to the features of a page so that
they can become familiar with the product, such as a custom dashboard, use the
Next button as the trigger. If the purpose is to accomplish a task,
such as creating a record, consider the following.
- To populate a field with a lookup element, such as a reference field or a date field,
do not use a trigger that opens the lookup window. The tour ends when the lookup window
opens. Use one of the following triggers:
- Next button: The user types the value or looks it up and selects it, and then clicks Next.
- Change Element Value trigger: After the user selects the value and clicks outside the field, the trigger moves to the next step.
- For some UI elements, you can use the Right click the Element
trigger. Typically, the right-click action is used to open a menu, however, you cannot
place a callout on a right-click menu option. You can use this trigger in a descriptive
guided tour where you want to describe right-click menu options. Put the descriptive
information into the callout text, and tell your users to right-click the element to
look at the menu. Following is an example of this type of callout.
When the user right-clicks the element, in this case a field label, this instruction disappears, and the next one appears.
- The Mouse over the Element trigger is similar to the Right click the Element trigger. When the user points to the element, the callout disappears. For example, if you demonstrate that a hint appears when you point to a field label, the callout step disappears before the hint text appears. This type of trigger can seem disruptive to the guided tour flow.
Using callouts
You must place a callout on top of an element to interact with it. The element is highlighted in blue when it is selected as the target. In the following example, it looks like the callout is pointing to the context menu icon, but notice that the header bar is highlighted blue.
This example depicts the correct placement of the callout for the context menu. Notice that the context menu icon is highlighted blue.
The following tips may also be helpful:
- When you place a callout on a form that contains tabs, consider that a user may not have the tab open for viewing. Create a new callout that instructs the user to first open the tab before proceeding with the rest of the tour.
- Minimize callouts on fields that are associated with dynamic content. A delayed page refresh may prematurely end the tour if the user cannot find the associated tour element.
- When you guide a user through pop-up windows, add your callout to the originating page on or near the pop-up icon. Within the callout instructions, guide your user through the steps intended for the pop-up window, because callouts cannot be added to the pop-up window.
- While the color of a callout is static in the standard platform UI, you can customize callouts on Service Portal. Consider using this capability to ensure a consistent look-and-feel between your callouts and your Service Portal pages. For more information on guided tours that you create on Service Portal pages, see Request guided tours.
Auto-launching your tour
Auto-launch a tour if you want your users to take the tour on their first page visit.
You may choose to auto-launch multiple tours from a single starting page. In this case, you can apply the auto-launch order to each tour successively so that your users begin the second tour upon their second page visit, their third tour upon their third page visit, and so forth. Use this option if you intend to start your users with an introductory tour and add increasing levels of complexity or different areas of focus with follow-up tours.