Inconvenient and complicated applications are a thing of the past: UX delivered by SAP Fiori

Hi everyone, my name is Marc Muschko and I am part of SAP Digital Business Services (consulting area) as a UX designer. My daily work covers all parts of the Design Thinking lifecycle from the initial problem to the productive solution. I work with customers and support their needs by advising general UX strategies, prototyping, Design Thinking workshops and even SAP Fiori development.
Udo Leutbecher, Head of my Mobile & UX Service EMEA unit is joining me in this blog, dedicated to the SAP Fiori Makers community.
The blog is a brief introduction to our SAP Fiori showcase that will be presented in the next SAP Fiori Makers community call on October 5^th.

Register here for the call where all details of the showcase will be revealed.

Difficulties. Lots and lots of Difficulties.

When Daimler approached us in December 2016 they had significant issues regarding their current Access Management solution: only very few key users, experienced with SAP in general and even more experienced with the SAP system access workflow, were able to create new access requests. For example, most end users did not have the knowledge to  request system access for a new employee. Because most users could not use the software by themselves alone, special resources had to be dedicated to do a single task every day which slowed the IT department overall. Simply – the process and the software were far too complex with few explanations available.

While there are standard SAP GRC Fiori apps available, they did not meet Daimlers specific requirements. The challenge was to create a new solution that is usable by all kinds of users while taking workload away from them.

Starring Design Thinking as The Solution

Knowing what the goal of the project should be, we started with a Design Thinking approach to identify the biggest issues. Creating a persona helped a lot to emphasize with the standard user. Defining the standard user (or a large group) was a bit tricky:

Key learnings from the research and persona parts were, that about 80% of the users “delegating” their tasks to few key users had little IT- & SAP-related experience. This can be difficult, especially if the underlying process in complex. So the “old” standard user was a person with a good amount of SAP- and/or IT-related experience. But the software, generally speaking, targets a much bigger span of users – starting with people having no SAP- and/or IT-related experience at all up to very experienced users. Our persona: a less experienced user currently not using the software like he should.

Past that we analyzed the current workflow to find the biggest pain points. We noticed that the current process (or workflow in the NetWeaver Business Client) had no overall structure – at least it appeared that way for new users. This was one of the biggest insights why so many people had issues using the application. They did not know exactly where to start, what to fill in and what to do in general.

To change that we changed the process steps into a more user-oriented order as you would expect it in a food delivery order, for example: pick your home address first (or have it filled in automatically) before choosing from the list of restaurants – and have the software tell you what information needs to be provided.

Besides the structure there were things like the amount of displayed information – for inexperienced users it was overwhelming. After brainstorming on what information was needed at every step we removed unnecessary input and display fields.

Once all requirements have been set, we started prototyping and researching with BUILD – the outcome was a first (well accepted) draft of the final product.

The development of the final solution has been done in a very agile way, with more features added over time due to user feedback – nevertheless we had to keep the application slim and easy to use. To be mentioned is that we had to do quite a few iterations on different UX areas, especially for the process order which has been changed a couple of times during the development.
Below is an image of the old/standard SAP design with a standard selection of items:

And now a sneak preview of the finished & newly designed application with a new, more user-oriented way of selection:

This is just an example of how the application has changed – it would take a long time to descripe and depict all changes, but we will go into more details on the finished application during the call!

At this point we have completely transferred the Access Management process from the old SAP design/user interface (NetWeaver Business Client) to the new, UX-focused SAP Fiori design end-to-end with separate apps for each business user.

With their new set of apps, all kinds of users are able to do Access Management for themselves or other users on the fly.

SAP Fiori Makers

Are you interested in discovering more? Then join the SAP Fiori Makers call staged each moth! You’ll get more insights into how SAP Fiori design guidelines and principles are improving the user experience for SAP customers.

Any additional questions regarding this project? Post a comment below – I’m looking forward to get in contact with you.