Recap SAP Screen Personas Customer Event – Get a kick-start with SAP’s UX Services

Some days ago I was posting my personal recap on a SAP Screen Personas Customer event. In that blog post I was providing

• an overview on SAP’s enforced UX strategy
• insights on how University of Warwick is adopting SAP Screen Personas to increase User productivity and reduce support and training cost

In this second blog I’ll recap additional customer discussions on SAP’s UXstrategy and share their views on SAP Screen Personas and SAP Fiori and the value they expect to get out of these new offerings. I’ll also share how SAP’s UX Services offering can help customers to achieve a consumer-grade UX for their SAP systems

Customers view on SAP’s UX strategy, SAP Screen Personas and SAP Fiori

The general feedback from the participants was that they like the fact that the UX Strategy and the new offerings like SAP Fiori had been co-innovated in several iterations with SAP customers (take for example Tom Greene, chief information and business services officer at Colgate-Palmolive – in this Video he is talking about the importance of UX and collaborating with SAP. Talking to the IT services providers in the room they support SAP’s recent investment in UX and want to leverage the new offerings with their clients in the next 12 months. However, they don’t yet feel comfortable on how to advice customers which path to go for the UX use cases their clients have. Some of them see SAP Screen Personas and SAP Fiori as conflicting offerings. As I heard that very often let’s take a deeper look how these 2 things work together

How SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas work together to enhance usability

The good thing is that these two solutions are complimentary and can be leveraged in different use case: Here some brief guidance on when to go down which route:

• If you are looking for an out-of the box solution which addresses mainly routine tasks and beyond the desktop office user you also need to to cover your mobile users then SAP Fiori might be the best way to start.
• If your focus is on the desktop users which are using the SAP GUI for both routine tasks and professional, complex scenario then SAP Screen Personas might be the right start.

For more details I refer you to the following SCN blog posted by Peter Spielvogel. If you are looking for a non-SAP epmployee view I recommend this post by Jon Reed on diginomica.

How SAP UX Services can help give you a UX kick-start

Is SAP ready to advice and support customers on their UX journey which do need help? Definitely yes! Several team in SAP’s global organization massively ramped-up their UX resources and either hired UI Designers and trained their existing staff on Design Thinking and User research methodologies. Different SAP groups like SAP Active Global Support, SAP Consulting, SAP Custom Development and most prominently Sam Yen’s UX Design Team, joined forces to establish a comprehensive Services offering. It is based on the four pillars.

Let’s close this up with a short customer testimonial from Ben Salter, Valero Energy on his view on SAP user experience design strategy and working with SAP design services.