Best Build Fiori Apps Rule 1: SAP Fiori apps have a proper design and follow the SAP Design Guidelines

At lot of people start developing own SAP Fiori Apps, but missing the programming guidelines to build a future proof applications for the Fiori Launchpad. At the SAP Teched 2015 in Las Vegas and Barcelona I presented my 10 golden rules to build future proof freestyle Fiori Applications based on UI5 SDK 1.28 and higher. In this serie I will explain the background of the rules starting with the first golden rule:

Golden Rule 1: SAP Fiori apps have a proper design and follow the SAP Design Guidelines

The idea about SAP Fiori Apps is to provide a consistent and holistic user experience for SAP software. The designs should be strong focus on ease of use and the experience should be intuitive and simple, across all devices.

To fulfill this requirement SAP develops a design philosophy for SAP Fiori. These SAP Fiori Design Principles are based on five core principles. The SAP Fiori user experience is role-based, responsive, simple, coherent, and delightful. The principles are easy to understand, but for a good design we need more.

Fiori apps should not be ‘old wine in a new bag‘. You really need to think about reinventing the user experience of your applications within your organisation. SAP facilitate this need by its SAP Design Thinking Playbook. The playbook explains all the steps which could be taken from understanding the needs till delivering of the apps and can be a goed starting point for developing your own design strategy. To help companies with its strategy and first implementations, SAP is offering the User Experience Design Services.

Another good starting point for designing SAP Fiori Apps is the SAP Splash Platform, which simplifies the process to 3 phases: Discover, Design & Deliver.

Splash supports these phases with experiences, knowledge, tools and guidelines. In the Discover phase you can use Galleries and Learning Content. For the Design phase you can use tools, like the SAP Build Tool to validate a design, to built a prototype, to do user research by showing the design and prototype and ask questions and to analyse the feedback and click behaviour of a big group of users.

For the Deliver phase, the prototype can be imported into the WebIDE and a developer can build the logic and interaction into Fiori application. At the end, the developer can deploy the application to the acceptance platform in the cloud or on premise, where the application can be tested and delivered for production.

The Fiori design principles forces you to develop the prototype and the final Fiori App using some assumptions. For this SAP has the SAP Fiori Guidelines. If you want to build future proof Fiori Apps, you should follow these guidelines. The guidelines will explain the foundations and the general concept of Fiori Applications. It will explain the floorpans, layouts, typography and the specific Fiori UI5 libraries, you should use. Every developer need to known these Guidelines before developing and need to use them during the building of a Fiori App.

I hope the links in this blog will link you to the right information for a proper design. In my next blog I will explain rule 2, SAP Fiori Apps always exist of a UI part and OData part which must be defined in different software components. An overview of all 10 golden rules can be found here.