A significant part of the appeal of events such as this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge16 conference is the way they bring together individuals of completely different backgrounds, united by the passions and technological interests they share.

Troy Azmoon, senior director of Design Experience at ServiceNow, Inc., is one such individual, and he joined Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about how his life’s journey led him to ServiceNow, the events that led him to become comfortable there and the challenges of designing a watch for the IoT age.

Starting off

The early part of the interview centered on the various jobs in diverse interests that had been held by Azmoon before he came to ServiceNow, with discussion moving from there to the ways he found himself warming to the atmosphere of the company. Azmoon expected that his time at ServiceNow would outlast any of his previous jobs, due in large part to how much he enjoyed working there.

Moving on to something ServiceNow had shown off in a keynote speech, Azmoon gave a quick look at a smartwatch intended to link industry workers to their teams in ways that would allow them real-time assessment of progress and goal deviation. Apart from these technical goals, Azmoon explained, there was also the challenge of “How do we make a watchface that you can monitor your work on, that’s so good-looking that you wouldn’t mind being seen with it at dinner?”

Exploring the appeal of this watch to users, Azmoon posited “One thing I see that might be compelling is, for example, a lot of organizations use charts to determine velocity, how long is [something] going to take … something like that, I think, can be very useful in this [watch] interface, because you can track velocity vs. actual, and as it starts to come out of alignment, you can see the circles … no longer overlapping.”

He continued, “What if you had an interface on your phone where you could load up any number of faces for the different teams that you’re monitoring? And the one that’s worrying you right now … you can make sure that as things are going forward, that they’re going in the right direction.”

Design in all things

“I look at everything,” Azmoon said, “and I take it back to the team. … Anything can inspire anything else. You just have to break down the barriers and explore the space.”

But finding the functionality to complement effective design is more than just plug and play. There’s also a significant issue with keeping the user’s attention and finding ways of integrating them naturally into the interface. As Azmoon noted, “That’s the big challenge for enterprise software in particular, to be good enough, to not be so bad to people that they go, ‘I wanna use something else; I don’t wanna use enterprise software. I’ll just use a free app somewhere.’”

The big challenge of going small

With today’s users being so dedicated to their mobile devices, the ‘mobile-first’ design plan is gaining more and more traction, particularly as so many apps are going mobile first and never moving on to desktop deployment.

“That’s one of the things I really love about a mobile interface,” Azmoon said. “It really forces you to make the hard decisions. … A lot of the options you don’t use … you just don’t provide an affordance for them on the mobile interface. In a way, that minimalism drives a better design. … That’s what it’s all about — the ability to get people the information they need so that they can make a decision as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE