Designing ServiceNow experiences for APAC enterprises

EmployeeWorks is the conversational layer I design on top of the portals: one AI experience across devices, chat-first, that turns a question into completed work instead of another form.

I designed it against real personas pulled from the client base: an IT help desk agent triaging 100+ incidents a day, a service delivery manager juggling shifts and hiring, a people manager drowning in scattered approvals, and an employee who just wants to know if their leave was approved. Each flow moves that person from reactive lookup to proactive, AI-surfaced action.

For a leading global mining company, the brief was a full digital GBS transformation: unify service delivery, strip out legacy complexity and connect people, processes and core systems through ServiceNow.

The centrepiece is Presto, a conversational request assistant built on the promise "no forms, just talk." Presto asks a few questions, captures the details and completes the request itself, replacing the manual form-filling that used to sit between a worker and a resolved ticket. Around it, I redesigned intake forms into simplified, organised categories, added clear SLAs with intelligent routing, and tightened validation and notifications to cut errors before they happen.

At Cognizant I design ServiceNow experiences for enterprise clients across APAC: a global mining company, Australia's largest supplier of home and office products, a leading primary care provider, an energy business, a not-for-profit superannuation fund with 130,000+ members, a global electronics company and a government conservation agency in New Zealand.

Each client arrives with the same tension: fragmented legacy systems, separate IT and HR sites, low engagement and a dated interface. Each needs a portal that feels like their brand, works for their people and still upgrades cleanly with the platform.

ServiceNow rewards restraint: every custom widget adds cost and upgrade risk, while pure out-of-the-box rarely matches how a business actually works. My job is finding the line, and most of the work ships as "slightly custom widgets": platform components, carefully themed and extended only where the user journey demands it.

• Workshops before wireframes. Aligning IT, operations and business stakeholders on priorities and design direction early.
• Portal themes. Intuitive, action-focused design using each customer's branding and user familiarity.
• Details that compound. Emergency support paths moved to the footer so users reach help faster from any page; status widgets that surface outages before tickets are raised.
• Accessibility as a baseline. WCAG 2.1 AA is a requirement in every engagement, not a nice-to-have.

Retail. For Australia's largest supplier of home and office products (9,000 employees), a shared services portal bringing IT, HR and Finance into one experience, with specialised sections per department, an active-items widget and a business service status feed.

Government. For New Zealand's Department of Conservation, a citizen-facing permit and permissions portal: structured workflows, a self-service applicant experience and GIS location intelligence, built to handle real-world complexity.

Finance. For a not-for-profit superannuation fund supporting 130,000+ members, an employee experience that moved the majority of routine issues to self-service.