Too much scrolling
The ticket screen showed fields nobody used, and the request itself sat at the bottom of the page.
SEF-MG Workspace Research
User research with the teams who resolve tickets at SEF-MG, the Minas Gerais Finance Department, turning their feedback on the ServiceNow workspace into a backlog of improvements the dev team then built.
The challenge
A workspace the resolvers had to fight.
SEF-MG teams resolve taxpayer tickets in a ServiceNow workspace every day. Small friction in that screen adds up fast, and the people using it had not been heard.
Save far from status
Status, resolution and the save button were far apart, so closing a ticket took extra steps.
Deadlines out of sight
SLA and due dates were hard to find, which made it hard to tell which ticket to handle first.
The process
Listen to every team first.
Plan the sessions
Three sessions with resolvers and coordinators: two in person and one remote, each with its own agenda.
Hear every team
Groups of 11, 15 and 17 people walked through how they handle tickets and where the workspace gets in the way.
Sort the findings
Each report went on a sticky note and was grouped into process, UI, data and naming issues.
Prioritize by impact
An impact and effort matrix ranked the issues, so the team could see what to fix first.
The solution
From sticky notes to a backlog.
The research did not produce screens. It produced a list of improvements, each one tied to what resolvers reported, ready for the dev team to build.
01 / 06Session with resolvers
The outcome
Their words became the backlog.
Every team heard
All resolver teams took part, so the list reflects the whole service desk and not one group’s view.
A ranked backlog
Improvements were ordered by impact and effort, which gave the dev team a clear place to start.
Built by the dev team
The suggested improvements went into the backlog and the development team implemented them.