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If you’ve followed our UX Champions series you’ll know our team has spent the last few months interviewing partners and customers driving successful UX projects using SAP Fiori. Hearing their stories, it’s clear that the return on investment of user experience is impactful – improved data quality and reduced training time, to name some examples. Yet often the ROI of UX projects is only evident once the project is completed. This is why many UX advocates still struggle to come up with a convincing business case to secure the executive buy-in.
Even if in the last few years companies are increasingly realizing that providing both their customers and employees a good user experience is the key to future-proofing their companies, they also need to make strategic, data-based decisions about how and where to invest their resources to achieve this. Being able to measure user experience data is a powerful way to go from gut-feeling to data-driven insights, so you can ensure executives are on board with your vision.
For this blog, we cooperated with SAP partner sovanta to explain the benefits of measuring user experience data throughout the UX project lifespan. They’ve recently launched the UX Score tool on the SAP Store to give companies a holistic view of how the user experience of their applications is performing and offer recommendations. Below, they share four key reasons why you and your team should invest the time and effort into measuring UX data:
- Get a holistic view of your digital landscape
Knowing where to improve an application when there is no industry standard for collecting quantitative experience data, and when most existing data relies on qualitative measurements such as “I like, I wish”, can be difficult. Though qualitative data can help explain factors such as why adoption rates may be poor, or why user retention may be lower than expected, it does not necessarily help you measure improvement over time. UX teams need to be proactive about gaining feedback and asking for ratings from their users (usability, desirability), while at the same time bringing in operational data (looking at efficiency and performance) to combine all given data points into a single source of truth.When you measure and quantify the UX of your applications, it establishes a reference point for their health and value, much like putting a stake in the ground, says Cody Wedl, Head of Experience Management and Business Development at sovanta. This lets you gain a better understanding of how the applications are performing, whether they are meeting the needs of end users, and how they are improving over time. You’ll be able to better understand how users see the value of their applications and how they measure the maturity of the landscape for their specific applications.
- Base your product roadmap on data-driven insights, not your gut feeling
Once you have that proverbial stake in the ground, you’ll be able to better decipher where the strengths and weaknesses of the applications lie, and where there is room for improvement (immediate or for the longer term). For product owners, this means no longer relying on their gut feeling to shape the product vision. Experience data is actually a great tool to build a better road map as you gain insights on what steps to prioritize and how to continue to build and improve on your applications. Using experience data also creates a common ground and the basis for conversation between stakeholders when it comes to setting priorities and allocating budget.
- Benchmark within your own app suite and against competitors
Gathering experience data allows you to benchmark the user experience both against your own suite of applications and against industry competitors. Benchmarking internally against your own applications gives you a holistic overview of your digital landscape and allows you to uncover winning factors and gaps across the different applications. Benchmarking against competitors lets you know where you stand in the market and where you might need to improve. - Make your users feel valued!
Finally, nothing shows your users that you care more than putting in the time and effort to understand how to help them fall in love with the applications they use for their daily work. Collecting experience data can be a useful starting point for engaging in conversations with key and end users about how the applications are working for them and where they would like to see improvements.
You clearly see the value of improving the user experience, but do your executives? Without having proof of the value of the improvements made to your processes and applications, it will be hard to secure the investments needed to effect a UX transformation at your company. Now that you are familiar with the reasons to measure user experience data, make sure to check out the follow-up blog post on 3 tools to measure user experience for SAP applications.
About sovanta: An SAP Gold partner and member of the SAP AppHaus Network, sovanta AG is an expert in creating a better user experience in the SAP environment by shaping innovative business solutions with the goal to revolutionize the way people work with business software.
About SAP Fiori: To learn more about the SAP Fiori user experience, please visit the community topic page.
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