Life Time Fitness was a long-time user of ServiceNow and leveraged the platform for its employee portal to provide financial information, education, and services. ServiceNow’s portals include a Knowledge Base feature that provides reference articles and helps improve self-serve experiences for users to avoid unnecessary IT support tickets. 

After their ServiceNow portal implementation, Life Time Fitness quickly discovered that the out-of-the-box portal didn’t accommodate their need for a larger integration between service catalog items and Knowledge Base articles bucketed under specific categories. 

Life Time Fitness faced three major pain points with their ServiceNow portal:

1. The basic Knowledge Base categories were structured in a way that was not compatible with the design they had in mind. Content was misplaced and required a manual review and reorganization.
2. Articles used in the Knowledge Base consisted of a PDF attachment with the content inside of it. Users had to download the file every time they wanted to access an article, resulting in a confusing and inconvenient experience.
3. The portal was extremely raw in design, hard to use, and the positioning of content on pages was confusing. The portal also didn’t reflect the strong brand and identity of Life Time Fitness. 

These major issues all attributed to the low rates of user adoption of the portal among their employees.

Life Time Fitness engaged GlideFast Consulting to guide them through the creation of a more robust portal that would meet their needs, increase user adoption, and prevent the creation of unnecessary support tickets. They needed users to be able serve themselves, quickly find what they were looking for, and have an enjoyable experience while doing so.

Structure

GlideFast Consulting proposed the creation of eight different sub-portals within one central Business Services portal. This central portal and its sub-portals would be structured with two levels of Knowledge Base categories designed to help users navigate through the portals easily by selecting specific categories they are seeking help with. With the ability to co-relate articles and forms within one single page of each category, the solution would provide clear pages for each subject matter and revolutionize the way in which the Service Portal is used. 

In addition, this structure incorporates forms that direct users to respective areas of the portal, reducing the number of support tickets submitted by users unable to find what they are looking for.

Design & User Experience

The proposed portals would be designed entirely in accordance with Life Time Fitness’ branding suite and aligned with the company’s mission, bringing users a sense of familiarity. The design would also incorporate subheadings on each sub-portal page to help users clearly distinguish which area the user was in and included a main menu widget that was developed for simple navigation.

In addition to the overall design, the portal solution by GlideFast Consulting included the development of a custom PDF rendering widget to replace the old portal Knowledge Article page format. This widget would display a rendering of the PDF directly on the page, removing the issue of pages appearing empty and the nuisance of having to download the PDF from each page.