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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

ServiceNow is a lot easier for admins/developers to use for workflow automation. In my opinion it’s a little easier than Salesforce but it could become bloated like Salesforce if it want already. Quickbase is another one I worked with but I was migrating workflows off of it. Quickbase was good for non IT people but not much better than Access or Excel.

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A lot depends on what is actually implemented on top of these systems. I absolutely loathe servicenow because of multi page multilevel forms with horrible, ugly, no good UX I have to deal with.

Yea not the worst UX I’ve seen but far from the best. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and most companies do. They have a new agent workspace to help improve usability.

I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it’s hard to find stuff.

The people who implement ServiceNow are usually, to put it mildly, idiots. It's usually combined with a religious conversion to some spin of ITIL, which is almost always by default implemented to facilitate a lowest common denominator operational outsourcing engagement.

The nasty forms are always a result of internal politics and bad governance. One client that I worked with had 8 different ways to represent a physical location. Each operational director in the organization had a unique system, and nobody mapped them.

If you put a real development team on the platform and the leadership gets it, it's an amazing tool.

I was curious about ServiceNow and googled it and was excited as they offer demos. But they require registration and a lot of information about myself, so i stopped. Is it not meant for small businesses perhaps?

Try the developer site, link below. You’ll need to register but it doesn’t look too invasive. It is expensive for small businesses. The main part is an ITSM suite but I’ve built workflows for call centers and account managers.

https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/program/developer

As a developer who is forced to use a service now interface for interacting with any other part of my organisation it's fucking awful in terms of user interface and friction. Unsure if that is because of our workplace setup or if it's intrinsic to the platform.

SerivceNow’s partners are godawful at implementation. Thanks to them I have decent job security unraveling the dog shit they left.

At least at my org it's awful because dev teams wrote / spec'd their own UX for "their forms."

Which, as you might imagine, resulted in a huge number of multiple choice, similarly-named properties, with all options also being inscrutablely named.

Long story short: programmers are terrible at UX.

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