UX Best Practices
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
ServiceNow's design principles—Focus, Flow, and Love—guide inclusivity, workflow efficiency, and emotional engagement in product design.
-
•
The Experience Design Methods (EDM) provide a clear, cross-functional process that aligns designers, researchers, engineers, and PMs.
-
•
Skipping foundational discovery phases leads to designing irrelevant or unusable products, as shown in their doggy daycare app example.
-
•
Empathy and journey mapping are key activities to deeply understand user needs and context before designing solutions.
-
•
In ideation, generating a broad range of ideas first, then narrowing based on feasibility and priorities, balances creativity with practicality.
-
•
Using tangible artifacts like storyboards and matrices helps align stakeholders and focus on user benefits and product values.
-
•
Rapid low-fidelity prototyping encourages quick feedback loops without wasting resources on details too early.
-
•
Close designer-engineer collaboration during implementation and thorough visual specifications ensure design fidelity in the final product.
-
•
Frequent user testing and prioritizing high-severity issues early help deliver user-centric and high-quality designs.
-
•
Organizational growth brings chaos which can be mitigated by consistent processes and clear communication standards.
Notable Quotes
"Focus principle ensures everything we design is inclusive, accessible, and simple to use across cultures and countries."
"Flow principle reminds us to accelerate both the customer and the users to get their work done effectively."
"Love principle is about emotionally supporting users, celebrating achievements, and creating visually beautiful products."
"If we skip the discover phase, we don’t understand the problem and end up designing something irrelevant."
"We encourage everyone to think big first then trim down based on priorities and keep a backlog of good ideas."
"Experience Design Methods is tailored for our organization to align research, design, engineering, and product management."
"Rapid low-fidelity prototypes let us get quick feedback without stakeholders focusing on minor visual details."
"Visual specs must include behavior, styles, accessibility, and edge cases so developers build accurately."
"Post-implementation reviews help catch bugs or style issues before customers see them, maintaining high quality."
"Building trust in the user is fundamental, especially in digital products like our doggy daycare app example."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"You have to check the AI’s work and provide feedback—just like you would with a human assistant."
Mark Interrante Harry MaxAI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
July 11, 2024
"The more the compliance level increased, the higher the cost efficiency."
Patrizia BertiniThe (r)evolution of designOps: It’s Time to Think (really) BIG
September 11, 2025
"Not knowing what something is called or what a newly inflated word means introduces confusion and causes people to talk across purposes."
Shan ShenTranslating UX Terms into Business Contexts
November 29, 2023
"60 to 90% of our ideas do not improve the metrics they were intended to improve."
Adam ThomasSurvival Metrics – Making Change in a Fast, Data-Informed, and Politically Safe Way
December 6, 2022
"We’re still operating from an industrial era hangover — a mechanistic way of problem solving that doesn’t fit today’s complexity."
Robin BeersResearch as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
March 12, 2021
"Accessibility at scale can put you into the VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous."
Sheri Byrne-HaberAccessibility at Scale
June 9, 2021
"People were sweating their pixels, but doing so inside of solos and personal barriers until we started critiquing transparently together."
Joseph MeersmanSweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique
June 10, 2021
"Make a business case for yourself by bragging about your capabilities and making them applicable."
Deanna Washington Bria Alexander Jon Fukuda Saara Kamppari-Miller Farid SabitovConnecting the Ops: Plenary Panel and Closing Circle
September 9, 2022
"Civic designers are in a privileged position; with privilege comes the power to empower the voices of those we serve."
Aaron Stienstra Lashanda HodgeLeveraging Civic Design to Advance Equity and Rebuild Trust in the US Federal Government
December 8, 2021
