Monthly Highlights from the SAP User Experience Community – Feb 1st

The New Year has gotten off to a great start at the SAP User Experience Community with lots of new and interesting posts.

Here’s my month-end compilation for you, but keep in mind that you can follow me on twitter @estrblankenship to find out about new posts as soon as they are published.

In Learn the basics about design and user experience:

• In the ninth interview in my series, I talk to Philip Miseldine, development expert in SAP’s Global Design team. Find out about design from a developer’s perspective!
• In this inspiring article, Using Design Thinking to Solve Community Problems, Carol Farnsworth talks about how she used Design Thinking to help different sides of a sticky community problem in the picturesque town of Sausalito, California, understand each other better and get closer to a common solution. 

In Skill up on design and user experience:  

• Some things are too simple to end up in textbooks – but too important to ignore. If you do usability testing, don’t miss these 5 Pragmatic Tips by Bernard Rummel.
• Konstantinos Drachtidis’s post, Web Components, Project Instances and Console Logs: A Triptych of Contemporary UX Prototyping, aims to help you stay flexible while prototyping for software.
• In Scenes: A New Method and Tool to Create Storyboards, Karen Detken introduces readers to a great new tool and a method that was created to empower business leaders and professionals of all industries to shape their ideas and scenarios in the form of fun illustrative storyboards without the need of refined drawing skills. Learn how to use it and download it for FREE.
• Anthony Jakubiak shares the Design & Co-Innovation Center favorite design videos of 2015. Nice must-watch list! 

In Design News:  

• Looking for a better clothes shopping experience? Me too! That’s why I found Innovative Ideas for Retail – The Smart Fitting Room by Holger Maassen so interesting.
• In Build Your Own Fiori App in the Cloud and Win an iPad Pro Bob Caswell announces that openSAP is offering a brand new course next month called Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud – 2016 Edition. It’s a follow up to a similar course offered last year but with all new content focused on the latest best practices for how to effectively create your own Fiori app.
• Have you ever played the childhood game with your sibling or friend where you mirror their words and actions, much to their annoyance? In Empathy at Work Janaki Kumar explains how what you were doing was nature’s way to activate your mirror neurons and build your capacity for empathy.

In Participate in improving products with SAP:  

• Andreas Hauser, SVP and Global Head of SAP’s Design and Co-Innovation Center, reveals How 10 Customers Create Value with Design.

In the Discussion Forum:

• In Exchange to be the change – A recap of DTX New York City, Maren Christin Mueller shares her takeaways from this two-day event aimed at bringing academia and practice together to share experiences and to jointly work on improving the ways Design Thinking is explored, managed, and taught.
• In Design Thinking in the Himalayas, Jochen Guertler correlates his experiences trekking for three weeks through Nepal’s beautiful Solukhumbu district and his design thinking work.

I hope you find these highlights useful, but keep in mind that it is not comprehensive of all the activity on the community during the last month. Checkout the SAP User Experience Community to discover the interesting contributions that I left out of this post!

Thanks for your interest in the SAP User Experience Community and please, join the conversation!

Esther