Help wanted! Say hello to new Profile Experience

Hello, guten Tag, ahoi, salut, hola, halihó to you All!

It has been a while since I last blogged and apparently I’m always asking for some help, but normally also giving something in exchange 🙂

If you were following my posts carefully I’ve been spilling the beans in a few comments in the Coffee Corner and some ideas in Customer Influence that my team has been working on something big in the last few months.

And here it is: I’d like to proudly present the new version of Universal Profile, aka people.sap.com

Lets talk a little bit about the why, what, where and when of the new profile:

Why?

We always intended to make the profile something that brings benefit to our users not only from the social networking perspective, but as a living entity that’s worth visiting. After some time, we realized that the current profile design won’t scale enough to give that to you in a meaningful and easily manageable way.

So we started digging and researching…

What?

When we were deciding what the profile should provide we took all the input and feedback that you shared with us in the last few years through various channels, such as blogs, Q&A, Coffee Corner Discussions, ideas from Customer Influence (previously IdeaPlace), the retired UserEcho and also that came from our user groups like the Strategic Advisory Council, Reputation Advisory Group and Mentors.

In addition to these, we reviewed what SAP offers today to interact with you online not only via the Community, but also for developers, partners, different support channels or learning opportunities in LearningHub or OpenSAP. We gathered these tasks and actions and grouped them according to what main areas they belonged to (Community, Products, Support, Learning…etc) and matched to what questions and ideas you provided.

After analysing everything we ended up with three main pillars that are the foundational pieces for the profile:

1. Representing yourself to others

We can call this the public profile aspect, like what is the information that you would like to share about yourself that represents you as an expert including your content that you created, reputation, certifications…etc.

2. Your digital footprint

We all want an overview that shows what we contributed and participated in. This overview could  include your authored content, the trainings you attended, your support tickets requiring answers, products you purchased, and trials that signed up for.

3. Manage your interactions with SAP

Talking to SAP representatives or other fellow users is a main part of our days (or nights depending on how SAPaholic you are), so you don’t just want to see what you did — you want to control how you see it. That means better personalization of the experience — managing, changing, and using it. This experience includes everything from subscription preferences to notifications…you name it.

After determining what the profile should provide, we set out to structure it in the best possible manner — sometimes looking to outside sources for inspiration as we mixed, shaped, remixed, and reshaped the profile.

Where?

The intention is to replace the current profile on people.sap.com — so leaving everything that is there today while also adding enhancements, such as:

• all authored content including comments and drafts
• central place to manage your subscriptions (people, tags, content)
• more granular privacy and visibility settings
• dashboard for items that require your action and things to have at your fingertips for easy access

When?

We intend to launch a first version of the new profile after everyone is back from the beach and their well deserved Summer vacations. But not before you shared your opinion.

Which leads us to the title of my post: HELP WANTED!

We were lucky enough to do user testing at SAPPHIRENOW/ASUG, but we want to have more feedback with the involvement of the SAP Community.

For this, I’m looking for approximately 20 people to participate in a remote user study with mixed backgrounds and activity levels within the SAP Community.

For the test you need to:

• Have a laptop or PC. Your screen will be recorded to see what you are looking and commenting on.
• Grab a mic and think out loud! We want to hear your thoughts. Your feedback will help us improve.
• Sacrifice maximum 60 minutes of your life (knowing that this time will provide the overall community with value for far longer than that).

If you are interested in participating, please leave a comment here and we will reach out to you when you are selected and describe the next steps.

Thanks for building the new profile with us!

UPDATE: Thank you for your interest in testing the new Profile! The selected testers will receive an email about the details during the upcoming week or two.

UPDATE2: The testing period is closing soon, please make sure that you perform your tests in the next few days!