ServiceNow - the evolution of the UI

TLDR: I think Workspaces will be the main focus from now on, and UI16 will be forgotten. It has pros and cons. I still think everything is great.

Like >20.000 others, I attended the ServiceNow Knowledge conference in Las Vegas this May. For me, going to this conference doesn't just allow me to see a different place far away from home, meeting others with similar professional interests, and giving me an arena to meet clients in a far more informal environment than usual - I take pleasure in sitting hours in sessions absorbing huge amounts of knowledge about the platform I spend most of my time with. Hey, we even did good at the competitions, which was fun:

Shout out to my teammates Einvald (Sopra Steria) and Sergio (CrossFuze)!

This year, like the last one, there were loads of improvements to the platform which I just can't wait to check out as soon as it is released. This year though, I noticed one detail which got my attention:

I didn't see a single demo in UI16 from ServiceNow.

We recently saw the release of the Agent Workspace, and at we have already learned that there will be more Workspaces for other areas as well, for example Service Owner Workspace.

The Workspace is, from what I understand, "built from scratch" - so it relies on newer tech than everything preceding it. The problem with UI16, and the versions before it, was that they relied too much on tech you couldn't (or refused to) build on. Take for example the Jelly-code. If you wanted to make enhancements to the form, as an example, you had to touch on Jelly-code on some point. As a programmer, I died a bit inside every time. When Service Portal was announced, it was hinted that new technology had been introduced which would remove the need for Jelly once and for all. Well, as that wasn't the truth, it did pretty much move every single customer from the old CMS-system, something nobody has regretted since.

Now, we developers are never satisfied - of course - so introducing AngularJS just wasn't enough either. Sure, it was cool the first year, but the issue with tech like that is that there's always something better, and cooler, coming down the road. But that's a discussion well covered already for a long time. (What I would like to see is that the different web frameworks like Angular, Node.js, React .. could be opt-in plugins, allowing the instance admins to decide for themselves - and take their own risks. But that's just me. Risk taker. Dangerous.)

Anyways.

What I noticed in the demos from most of the sessions presented by ServiceNow itself, was that there were all pretty much part of the new Workspace ecosystem. UI16, not part of the future. It wasn't specifically announced (that I heard) that we can start moving away from UI16, but it was the feeling I got at the end of the day.

So what do I think about this? Well, like most changes in life, I have mixed feelings about it. If the case is to move away from UI16 with Workspace, like we moved away from CMS with Service Portal, we won't be able to customize as wildly as we could before. This is obviously what ServiceNow wants, and it's a good strategy. The "low code / no code" hype was huge this year. You don't want all the crazy stuff that has been going on, making instances unstable and all.

I haven't seen any examples yet of customizing the Workspaces, except from some configurations here and there. It worries me to think that we will be limited in our ways to try out innovation on forms and lists. I have had alot of fun making weird UI Macros / Formatters and placing them in forms. Having these forms in Workspace and they simply won't show up at all. Will we be able to do something similar in Workspaces? I fear possibilities of customizations will be few. Most likely it will be possible within a few more versions due to community demand though.

But hey, no more Jelly I guess! Nothing would please me more.

Also, don't get me wrong, I still think it is great, and I embrace any improvement those smartypants at ServiceNow come up with. The hope is I can do some magic on these Workspaces!