Personal Insights
World Class User Experience?
Like most companies we’re on the journey to a “digital transformation”, with all the buss words like customer-journey, system thinking, design thinking and what not. Exciting times indeed.
Something that has caught my attention the role of Solution Architect with our SAP group, is the notion that we should have a “World Class User Experience”, not only for customers, but also for employees. This got me, and some of our super users, thinking if Fiori and Fiori Fundamentals could live up to this hype.
(While googling I was amused to see that Fiori was referred to as “consumer grade” after 20 years of things being “enterprise grade”.)
We’ve already decided to invest heavily in learning the “New ABAP Programming Model” and when time comes for SCP the “Abap Restful Programming”, which basically means our world class UXs need to be supported by an OData backend. After showing some Fiori Element apps to our ux team we’ve said that at least it’s up for debate if Fiori could be a world class experience, thus I’ve set out to explore options.
The requirements are simple:
- The development effort should not be substantially longer than for Elements
- Existing Odata services (all built on CDSs with annotations) should be completely reusable
- It should be possible to find talents who could work with this combination
- It should support SSO via Active Directory, although this I suspect is mostly up to Browser/Gateway to agree on.
Other parts of our company is working with React and redux, so my first approach is to try to build one of our Result-List-based Fiori Elements app using React, Redux and React-odata for data access.
Does anyone have any experience in this, what are your opinions? Should I tell our UX to accept what we’re showing, or is this an exciting possibility to lead the pack ? What are our alternatives, VUI, Angular, the world outside of SAP is mindbogglingly big 🙂
Happy for all thoughts on this, I’m sure lots of you have thought of alternatives for your custom development.
Follow my first attempts at https://github.com/matt1as/activities_react