The new SSP in the wild: what does yours look like?

What your homepage looks like, tile layout, banner, the works

OK, here is the University of Bergen homepage (for a user who is both employee and student, some tiles are for only one of those groups):

One thing you carried over from your old setup

Well, almost everything really. We kept most of the tiles and structure. We struggled a bit to fit the icons nicely. (They still aren’t perfect!)

One thing you changed or had to rethink

We used to have three separate tiles for Get help (a greneric call submission form), Knowledge base and My calls. We now combined these into the Help and my enquiries tile, very much inspired by the MyTopdesk homepage!

How your end users are responding, especially to the search bar and the new layout

We have had some positive feedback on the AI search. Not much else (but it is holiday time here….). In the beta preview some users thought there was too much space in top spent on the search banner and news before you got to the “useful parts” (the tiles). We would like to have the possibility to choose height for the search banner! It could well be a bit lower.

Well you asked ​@Sanne van Opstal-Brakel !!

As many know we like to have a bit of fun with ours, so here is the current login page:
 

And when a standard Caller logs in they are met with this:
 

Very much a work in progress and we are currently onboarding 700+ new Registered Callers from our College 

One thing you carried over from your old setup

The structure - although we removed some tiles from the home page that were links to subpages (such as IT Buying & IT Security)

One thing you changed or had to rethink

the images on the tiles - still trying to get this right … we prefer acronyms such as “HR”, “IT” but with the new set up any images with word become blurred.

How your end users are responding, especially to the search bar and the new layout
Little to no customer feedback as yet.
Internally, we like the use of the whole window, no big empty spaces either side.
I would prefer that the following were larger or more visible:

• the logo
• the links to News, Requests (should be “My Calls” as some are faults - pedantic?) & Service Disruptions
• the size and position of the link to Services (I forget it’s even there) 

I love the big Search bar, and the addition of dark mode

Oh, and this was last month!
 

I love that you make the effort to update your SSP for specific occasions ​@Andrew Crawford  It's looks great!

And ​​​​​@Magne B. your SSP looks like it fits the University perfectly it's all nicely aligned and recongizable! 

How we structured our Self-Service Portal: department-based navigation

Hi everyone! I'd like to share how we organized the Self-Service Portal for one of our customers, CrediSIS, a credit cooperative system in Brazil.

Login page
On the login page, we chose to place the institution's building in the background.

The logic behind the layout

Our starting point was a simple question: what does the requester need first? Based on that, the two most-used options are placed right at the top of the portal:

1. Knowledge Base – so users can try self-service before opening a ticket, reducing call volume for operators.
2. My Requests – quick access to follow up on everything they've already submitted.

Department-based organization

From there, the entire portal is organized by department. Every department that works with TOPdesk has its own dedicated tile on the homepage — Administrative, IT Infrastructure, IT Operations, HR (People Management), Finance, Information Security, Legal & Compliance, Payment Methods, Insurance, Marketing & Communication, and so on. In total, the portal covers 25+ business areas.

What's inside each department tile

When the requester opens a department, they always find the same consistent structure:

• New Ticket – all the request types that department handles, so the user never has to guess which team is responsible.
• My Tickets – [Department] – an overview of the user's own tickets for that area and, if permission is granted, tickets opened by their whole team/branch.
• Ticket Report – [Department] – a report filtered by cooperative, period and requester, giving managers visibility without needing operator access.

Why we like this approach

• The requester thinks in terms of "who solves my problem" (a department), not internal service catalog logic.
• Every tile follows the same pattern, so once users learn one department, they know how to navigate all of them.
• Managers get self-service reporting per area, which reduced the number of "status update" requests reaching operators.

Curious to hear how others decided between organizing by department vs. by service/topic — what worked best for your organization?

Awesome first examples ​@Magne B., ​@Andrew Crawford and ​@Otavio Augusto Bosa ! Very inspiring!!

​@Simon Rupp , FYI - you can find here quite interesting feedback from some of our customers around the world!