Timeline
Jun 2022 – Mar 2023
Interface
Windows Application
Role
Lead Product Designer
Time
5 min read
Team
Solo designer working with product and engineering
Responsibilities
End-to-end UX design ownership, User research & validation, Interaction & UI design, Design specifications, Cross-functional stakeholder alignment
Problem
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) mimics human interactions with user interfaces to automate routine tasks—clicking, typing, and navigating exactly as humans do. This makes RPA particularly valuable for legacy applications without APIs, enabling automation without complex system integrations.
ServiceNow's RPA development platform offered a low-code solution for creating automations (Figure 1), but still required significant technical expertise—limiting its accessibility for non-technical users. While business experts could spot automation opportunities, it was difficult for them to create simple proof-of-concept (POC) automations without developer support. Creating these POCs was a complex process and took time away from their core strategic priorities.
Adding to this challenge was a clear market gap – most of our competitors offered a "recorder" tool that allowed non-technical users to create automations simply by recording their tasks. This feature had become an industry standard, and its absence from our platform was increasingly noted in sales conversations with potential customers.
Solution
Our solution empowers non-technical users to create automations through a modern and streamlined recording interface inspired by consumer screen recording tools (Figure 2). A collapsible panel and persistent mini-recorder provide clear recording status while staying unobtrusive—a departure from traditional enterprise software interfaces. The tool automatically detects UI elements across different applications and presents contextual actions through an elegant dark interface, guiding users without getting in their way. When recording is complete, all captured actions automatically translate into a ready-to-use automation workflow in the RPA Desktop Studio, enabling non-technical users to create automations independently.
Business Goals
To kick-off this project, I facilitated a workshop with PMs and engineering leads where we established a shared understanding of our goals and guiding principles:
Citizen developers (business users) should feel empowered to build automations.
Using a recorder should increase developers' speed and accuracy.
Recorder should simplify the automation building experience and become a tool that users rely on for all their automations.
This helped align the team's vision and set the foundation for the project's direction.
Competitive Analysis
Through analysis of Gartner and Forrester reports, I discovered that recorder functionality had become a standard requirement for RPA platforms to be included in this report, and these analyst reports are widely used by IT departments of corporations, and often influence their buying decisions.
I then performed a competitive analysis of the six key competitors and observed that five out of six competitors already offered this feature.
I worked through a comprehensive task flow in each of these recorders and analyzed the experience to learn what they were doing well and what we could do better.
Figure 3: Comparing the Experience of Competitors and a UX Summary
User Research
It became clear that having a recorder tool is important for us to be a competitive player in the RPA business, however, I wanted to see how this tool would help our users. I conducted user interviews to validate the need of this recorder, as well as, to understand their goals, motivations, and pain points.
Hypothesis
RPA Recorder will
Enable developers to build automations faster
Enable solution consultants to build automations for customer demos easily.
Enable business users to capture the process and hand it over to IT.
Encourage business users to build the automation themselves.
Methodology
Method: Moderated 60-minute remote user interviews
Target User Groups: RPA Developers, Solution Consultants, Business Users
Users (n=8): 3 RPA Developers, 3 Solution Consultants, 2 Business Users
Insights
The interviews revealed critical user workflows and unmet needs around RPA tooling. This research filled a significant gap—our team frequently referenced "professional developers," "citizen developers," "business users," and "process owners" without a shared understanding of who these users actually were or how they worked. I synthesized the findings into persona cards that define each user category, their company role, and how a recorder tool would integrate into their existing workflows.
User & Task Flows
Given the insights, I created a user and task flows for two target users:
Primary User - Citizen Developer
Secondary User - Professional Developer
At this stage, I did not create a flow for mid-level developer because I find that designing for different ends of the spectrum often covers most use-cases for those in the middle.
Ideation
I then translated the above task flows into lo-fi and mid-fi screens and ideated on the recorder interface.
Back to Drawing
Board
Despite making progress on the designs, I felt unsatisfied with the designs I kept drawing. It felt too predictable, too similar to competitiors, and too “enterprise-y.” I felt stuck and wanted to do something to inspire me and think outside the box. Thus, I organized a collaborative brainstorming session with designers outside the project to bring fresh perspectives. This helped break away from market conventions (that I was so conditioned to seeing) and led to exploring diverse design directions that were more inspired by consumer software. This helped me create new concepts.
Concept 1 - Floating Recorder Control
Define & Refine Solution
To decide which concept I would further refine and focus on, I systematically evaluated these concepts by creating a comprehensive matrix that weighed various factors such as technical feasibility, user experience impact, alignment with existing patterns, and future scalability.
This systematic evaluation helped guide stakeholder discussions and ultimately led to selecting a concept that balanced innovation with practical constraints. Despite Concept 3 “scoring lower” than Concepts 1 and 2 in the above matrix, it stood out to me as the perfect balance of innovation, feasibility, and scalability. The rest of the team agreed and found this solution to be sleeker than that of our competitors, while still being technically feasible. This design, was a significant departure from traditional enterprise design, bringing delight to our users’ experience as it resembled consumer experiences that they’ve known and loved.
Key Design Decisions
The recorder tool design required addressing several critical considerations to create an intuitive experience within ServiceNow’s complex ecosystem:
Platform Integration: Introducing a new tool within an established and complex RPA development environment.
Manual Action Recording: Balancing technical constraints with user expectations.
User Trust & Privacy: Building confidence through transparent data capture communication.
Workflow Review, Editing and Saving: Enabling users to validate and refine recorded actions before converting to workflow.
Visual Design & Theming: Navigating inconsistent design systems across acquired and native products.
Platform integration
Challenge: Integrating a simplified recording tool into ServiceNow’s complex RPA platform.
Solution: Created multiple entry points and contextual guidance to reduce friction for both new and existing users:
Feature introduction modal to educate users about the new capability
Easy-access launcher button for quick tool activation
Contextual help integration linking to documentation and future interactive assistance
Dismissible discovery popup for users who want to explore the feature later
This multi-pathway approach ensures smooth adoption across different user comfort levels and experience with the platform. Ideally, we would have addressed the daunting "blank canvas" experience when starting new projects, this broader UX improvement was beyond the recorder tool's scope.
Manual Action Recording
Challenge: While the ideal RPA automation would seamlessly record screen actions and convert them directly into workflows, technical constraints and user requirements made this impossible. Developers need to automate actions not easily captured through screen recording (like extracting text from form fields) and perform multiple actions per element. Additionally, technical limitations prevented pulling data from all applications users might interact with.
Solution: Designed a "bounding box with manual action" experience that balances technical constraints with user needs:
Explicit element selection with showing available actions allowing users to select different interactions (set text, click, hover, get text, etc.)
Manual input prompts for actions requiring user-provided data
Clear confirmation feedback when each action is successfully recorded
This approach accommodates both technical limitations and developer requirements for precise control over multiple actions per element across various applications.
user trust & privacy
Challenge: User concerns about data capture and privacy during recording sessions.
Solution: Clear visual communication throughout the recording experience:
Clear recording status indicator with color-coded states (inactive vs. active recording)
Real-time feedback showing what and how elements can be recorded with bounding box overlays
Confirmation messages providing immediate feedback when interactions are successfully captured
These design decisions prioritize user trust through transparency, ensuring users always understand what data is being captured and when.
Review, Edit & Save
Challenge: Users needed to track, manage, and finalize recorded automation sequences across multiple applications before converting them into executable workflows.
Solution: Implemented a collapsable side panel interface that provides recording oversight without losing context:
Action list overview showing all captured interactions with their source applications
Management controls for deleting unwanted actions (editing and drag-drop reordering planned for future releases)
Cross-application tracking to support automation workflows spanning multiple apps or websites
Workflow conversion allowing users to save recorded sequences as workflows for further development in desktop studio
The collapsable side panel approach was ideal compared to all other concepts I explored because it maximized screen real estate while providing a persistent, scannable view of the automation sequence as users continued recording across different applications.
Visual Design & Theming
Challenge: ServiceNow’s design system was in transition—the acquired RPA product used Design System V1 (light theme, green accent), while ServiceNow was launching Design System V2 (purple accent, dark theme capability). I had to decide whether to design the recorder tool using the current RPA theme (increasing design debt) or the new system theme (creating temporary inconsistency between recorder and RPA platform).
My Approach: I recommended implementing the dark theme based on strategic considerations:
Design system alignment with ServiceNow's V2 trajectory
Enhanced visibility against light UIs of typical web/legacy applications
Modern appeal that could strengthen sales positioning
While most engineers and PMs supported my recommendation, conflicting opinions and communication breakdowns late in development created tension when designs were changed without designer involvement. Working with a newly acquired team unfamiliar with UX processes, I invested significant time building relationships, educating stakeholders on design's strategic value, and clearly communicating this multi-faceted rationale.
Resolution: After extensive discussions between design, product and engineering leadership, we established a phased implementation—launching with light theme for immediate compatibility, then transitioning to dark theme in the subsequent release. This balanced immediate business needs with long-term design system alignment.
Impact & Opportunities
While I transitioned before launch, the project delivered:
A modernized recorder tool
Foundation for future dark mode implementation
Framework for feature enhancements
Identified areas for enhancement:
Improved onboarding experience
Better field name capture
Interactive tutorial system
Dark mode implementation
Learnings
Research Validation & User Understanding: The project reinforced the critical importance of thorough user research, even when a solution seems predetermined. While we started with a mandate to build a recorder tool, our research:
Challenged assumptions about who would use the tool
Precisely identified our primary user group (citizen developers)
Validated the business case with concrete user needs
Provided clear direction for feature prioritization
Design Leadership & Advocacy: Working with a newly acquired team that had limited experience in working with design, highlighted the importance of design leadership:
Established design's role in decision-making processes
Built relationships with stakeholders through clear communication of design rationale
Learned to balance firmness on user needs with flexibility on implementation
Developed strategies for maintaining design quality while meeting business timelines
Personal Growth: Through this project, I developed:
Stronger stakeholder management skills, particularly in challenging situations
Better understanding of enterprise software development constraints
Improved ability to advocate for design decisions
© 2025 Akanksha Kevalramani. All Rights Reserved.
