Its time to SPLASH your mind with SAP Build

SAP just launches the 4th release of SAP BUILD. The new name is SPLASH powered by BUILD. It shows that SAP have future plan to improve the SPLASH platform with multiple tools like BUILD. I’m very thrilled to see this platform evolution.

This platform is really what Fiori architect and designer were waiting for. A great tool that help people like me, bringing ideas and concepts into an application designer, where people can try the result by themselves and comment on the go the work in progress. This amazing tool helps architect like me building application prototype that looks and reacts exactly like a real SAP Fiori app. No more wasted time during the app development by going back and forth to the user to show the application by frame and then realized that what was built was not exactly what users have in mind. This application already helps me a lot on my architect job and makes me shine in front of customers.

Basically, BUILD empowers SAP project teams to easily create interactive prototypes that can be shared with your users. The major goals are:

• Build prototypes from sketches, built-in UI elements and floor plans, and leverage your own data.
• Conduct user research with surveys, annotations / comments and usage analytics.
• Accelerate development: finalized prototypes and generate UI 5 starter code.
• Link to Design Services and online training

PROTOTYPING

It took me some times to feel comfortable with the prototyping tool. I’m not a Fiori application developer or programmer, but more a solution architect that need to design Fiori application specific to user needs. Now i can say this tool help me to achieve my work in a very efficient way. With the latest release, you can now clone a Fiori app template provided by SAP and then starts modify it. There are more than 20 templates available right now and they cover a great span of scenarios. With this prototyping tool you can:

• Start from an existing Fiori Application template and build your own
• Start from a picture of the design you did on a white board or on a corner of a napkin.
• Start from an Excel file with your data in it. SPLASH will bring the data in your prototype and show information based on user selection like a real app.
• Add controls like button, hotspot in your design to simulate actions in the mock-up
• Add pages to your prototype so you can simulate subpages to the main page like item details, data mining, …
• Make it more precise by adjusting control property so the prototype will react like in reality
• Try it along the way so you can see how it reacts in real life.
• Publish your prototype and invite other members to join you and collaborate on your project

No more needs of mock-up design tools to do this. I use to work with Balsamiq, but i found those kind of tools limited in a certain way because they were not following Fiori guidelines and basic concepts. Now SPLASH fits perfectly with SAP Fiori and accelerate by 10 the design and conception phase.

Here an example of the prototype designer tool.

STUDYING

SAP SPLASH allows you to invite your client to join and try your prototype and the most important give you feedbacks. No more need to display your prototype in front of users and do a focus group. This can be done remotely by inviting your users to try their future Fiori application before writing a single line of code. The main features of the study tools are:

• Create multiples researches and tryouts of your prototype along the design process
• Use your prototype and assign task to your crowd so they can follow your guidance in their trial
• Use pictures of your hand drawing or logos for your app to probe your audience
• Ask users to complete a task by giving you feedback through annotations directly located in your prototype for review, through free text format or by selecting multiple choice of answers
• Publish your study and invite people to try your application

Once launched, you can follow the progress of your study live! You can now see how people react with the application and learn what they have to say about their experience. Many KPIs and graphical analytics are proposed like:

• Number of participants who try your application and the average time they use the platform
• Number of annotations and comments posted
• How many people like your applications functionalities, or get neutral or dislike
• What was the fastest time to complete the required tasks
• How many participants succeed to complete the tasks, fail or abandon

From there, you can get access to all annotations, comments and feedbacks from users. You can see where exactly in your prototype user put there annotation and the heat map of your screen where used clicked the most during their trial.

Here some examples of analytics, annotations and heat map.

BUILDING

Once your application prototype is ready, it’s time to move on and start the building process with WEB IDE. I didn’t experiment this last step but SPLASH seems to be integrated with WEB IDE. If its really the fact, this is very cool! I will investigate this feature pretty soon an come back to you with more details.

You can try the beta version of SPLASH by using this link: SplashApp

See that video introduction to SPLASH: UXies 2015 Honorable Mention Winner – SAP Splash – Design Better Experiences by SAP Labs – YouTube