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SAP Fiori: new Horizon visual theme available as preview – we want your feedback!
Led by our new Chief Design Officer Benedikt Lehnert, we are transforming our design and development culture here at SAP, to focus even more strongly on helping people get their work done faster, more easily, and with better outcomes. If you haven’t already read about it, then do read his blog post before continuing here:
As Ben outlines there, we are changing how we design and develop applications, with a focus on incorporating much more feedback and insights from our users. That is why we are, for the first time, shipping a preview rather than a final version of the new SAP Fiori visual theme Horizon, along with channels for collecting feedback from users.
This preview is available to SAP Cloud customers starting with the 2111 release, which became available this week. It is also available as a preview for developers using SAPUI5 in the SAP Business Technology Platform, as outlined at the end of this post.
Preview for SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 customers
If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can register using this link to let your users try it out and provide feedback:
We offer you two ways to give feedback:
- Directly in the system: you can enable the preview so that users can directly toggle between the current design and the new design, as you can see in the video below. When using the new design, they can give feedback directly in the system through a built-in survey based on Qualtrics® software.
- Participating in a moderated desirability study, where SAP design experts will go through examples of the new design with each of those users who you nominate in a 1:1 call, and collect your users’ feedback.
If you want, you can choose both approaches, i.e. give all your users the opportunity to try it out in the system as well as selecting some users for the desirability study.
You are probably wondering what the new theme looks like – here is a one minute video showing the new theme, how you can switch it on and off, and what the built-in survey looks like:
As Benedikt Lehnert outlined in his post, Horizon embodies a new set of design principles. As a result of these, the new Horizon theme introduces signature design elements that focus on helping people get their job done faster and effortlessly. What are these elements and how do you benefit as an SAP S/4HANA Cloud customer? With the planned final version of Horizon, we are
- Improving information hierarchy through simplified header bar, account menu, search and side navigation.
- Creating a sense of focus by leveraging contrast and white space to give room for content to stand out.
- Updating our color palette to feel modern and fresh while meeting WCAG AA accessibility standards by default.
- Introducing a new icon set that communicates clearly and feels modern across all platforms.
- Using bold typography on page headers to create a natural information hierarchy.
- Simplifying the overall aesthetic for UI elements to make them easy to understand and interact with.
- Introducing rounded corners to create a friendly, approachable and modern look that invites people to get started with their work.
- Taking a mobile-first approach to ensure all experiences work the same across devices and reduce learning curve for end-users.
You can give us feedback on most of these with the Horizon preview. The above video showed how the Horizon preview compares with the current Quartz theme for a user in your sales department; here are two examples for users in procurement, where they have switched on the preview of the new design:
Figure 1: An example of the My Home page on the SAP Fiori launchpad for a purchaser, with the new design (Horizon preview) switched on.
Figure 2: The Procurement Overview app with the new design (Horizon preview) switched on.
Note that the preview available with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 is available for SAP Fiori apps built with SAPUI5 as well as classic applications built with WebDynpro for ABAP. Our current plans foresee classic applications using SAP GUI for HTML supporting the Horizon visual theme as a preview version in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202.
Horizon preview for SAPUI5 developers on SAP Business Technology Platform
Developers can try out the Horizon preview on SAP Business Technology Platform with the SAPUI5 versions 1.93.3 and 1.96.0. Note that the theme is marked as “Experimental”, in other words not released for productive use. The preview is also available for UI Integration Cards as well as the UI5 Web Components. To find out more, have a look at this blog post:
Further information
Find out more about the new SAP approach by reading Benedikt Lehnert’s blog post, or by listening to him talking about it at TechEd:
- Blog post: The Experience Mindset: Redesigning How We Build Products at SAP.
- TechEd session: Dive into the User Experience and Design Journey of SAP Solutions.
To keep up to date with news on SAP Fiori, check out the blog posts and questions and answers via
I honestly prefer the quartz theme. It looks more organized/less chaotic
I agree, even though it is always better to have more choices for the users to choose from according to their individual tastes, I too prefer the quartz theme.
Thank you Thomas. Great look and feel! Personally I like it! Anyway it is good to provide more choices to our customers, especially for the customers in APJ. We need to admit that different regions have different tastes of UX.
It doesn't matter what design SAP will provide since we have Theme Designer. I think thar almost clients will prefer own style and theme in corporate colours. SAP need to focus on more functional and technical innovations and less design improvements.
Hi Nikita,
Even customers who do decide to apply a corporate design can benefit from Horizon, because when creating a custom theme you always base it on an SAP theme as the starting point. If you want to include some of the aspects of Horizon, like the bold fonts for information hierarchy, you have less work to do if you base your custom theme on Horizon.
Also, in the cloud we tend to see customers taking the standard SAP theme, since creating a custom theme involves some effort, and when customers move to the cloud, they want as much as possible out of the box.
Regards,
Tom
Hi Thomas,
i like the rounded style even at the state it is right now. Here and there are still some elements which are missing these round edges, e.g. in nested elements. But overall i think it is a good theme and i hope customers will switch fast or redesign their custom themes built on top of sap_fiori_3.
Biggest thing i was wondering about, where is the dark mode? 🙂
Regards,
Nils
Hi Nils,
I'm glad you like it! We do have the dark mode in the road map, along with high contrast versions. Our current plan is to provide them later this year [but as always, plans can change!].
Regards,
Tom
Hi Thomas,
I think the new theme looks modern but a bit more chaotic as mentioned by others and a bit more difficult to read. But that might just be a question of getting use to it ☺️
The grey input fields are however a complete no go, to me!! That means inactive in web design so users would not expect to be able to input stuff in the fields.. but cudos for trying to tackle that conotation ☺️🤔
Regards,
Rasmus
Hi Rasmus,
Indeed, in the SAP world grey input fields are something completely new, but in the wider world of the internet there are many examples of applications with grey input fields. Nevertheless, as you say, it is essential that users can easily distinguish between fields which are editable and those which are not. Our design team is working on this right now - I'm confident that when we finalize the design we will have a good solution for this.
Regards,
Tom
Nice!
Is it planned for OnPremise as well?
Hi Ravid,
We are currently working on the road map.
Regards,
Tom
I had the same question. It says here the Horizon theme is supported from SAPUI5 1.93.3.
OnPremise stops at 1.71.
We don't get any of the new features from 1.72 onwards, including this new theme.
🙁
What exactly stops at 1.71??
Do you know when it will be available in theme designer?
Hi Fabien,
Horizon is currently only available as a preview version, not generally available yet. Our current plans are to make it generally available in the theme designer in the second half of the year - but as always, plans can change!
Regards,
Tom
Hello Thomas,
Thanks for your answer!
Is it the same roadmap BTP launchpad? We have a test&demo system and could be great to be early adopter if possible 🙂
Hi Fabien,
Indeed it is planned to be available same timeframe as Horizon for the SAP Launchpad service on BTP - as you can see in the road map, that is currently Q3/2022.
Regards,
Tom
I really love the new horizon theme! Already using it in the UI5 Web Components!
Hi Thomas,
Will the new Fiori Horizon Visual Theme be available in S4 HANA 2022 Private Cloud Edition (PCE) ? If yes, then can it be used for all SAP modules available in S4 HANA?
Thanks
Kamal
Hi Kamal,
Yes, indeed we are planning to make it available. Our current plan is to make a preview version available with SAP S/4HANA 2022 Private Cloud Edition this year, and to make it generally available in Q1/2023. Our goal is to cover the full scope of SAP S/4HANA 2022 Private Cloud Edition.
Regards,
Tom