As usual, TechEd was exciting, interesting, and great fun. This is what makes it one of my favorite experiences of the year. I and the other members of the SAP Screen Personas team (sebastian.steinhauer, tobias.queck, tamas.hoznek, and mark.schenecker) had the opportunity to: 
- learn how customers are approaching user experience (UX) renovation,
- share the latest product updates in formal presentations, expert sessions, and hands-on training, and
- hear several great success stories from customers that have gone live on SAP Screen Personas recently.
This blog will cover some highlights from TechEd Las Vegas 2015.
Lessons from customer sessions
One of the main reasons I would consider the show a great success was that we had several customers sharing how they are driving productivity through personalization.
- praveenmaben of Hunter Douglas discussed his experience with SAP Screen Personas 3.0 and the ramp-up program. He shared how the call center staff need less time to complete a remake order process.
Key take-away: work with an experienced partner who knows what they are doing. - steve.rumsby from University of Warwick talked about how maintenance workers now need only 45 minute to learn SAP, down from two hours before SAP Screen Personas. He also discussed his migration from SAP Screen Personas Version 2 to 3.
Key take-away: consider whether the auto-migration or manual makes sense for your specific use case. Reasons to use the manual approach include ability to take advantage of theming and the new scripting engine to simplify maintenance of flavors. - cherylsutton of Freescale Semiconductor demoed her work in SAP Screen Personas with both procurement and HR scenarios.
Key take-away: start small with a focused scenario and build from your success. Validate with end users to ensure you are addressing their specific needs. - Ketan Gohil of Fisker Automotive talked about his implementation of SAP Screen Personas to 150 engineers to simplify the production order process.
Key take-away: use SAP Screen Personas if you are not on SAP HANA so you can build an end-to-end process for your business users. 
andree.leidenfrost and diego.lombardini of Fairfax Media showed how they simplified purchasing with SAP Screen Personas.
Key take-away: focus on making incremental performance improvements. Understand how each action on the screen affects the back-end and rendering time and modify your screens to balance performance and usability.- lavaughny.urbano from Intel discussed how she improved usability for factory floor workers with SAP Screen Personas 3.0. They improved productivity by simplifying screens and reducing the probability of having to redo transactions.
Key take-away: focus on the key productivity drains and eliminate them by modifying work flows, including simplifying screens.
Other highlights
- We had many packed sessions (lecture, hands-on, and expert) with hundreds of people eager to learn more about SAP Screen Personas.
- At the ASUG pre-conference UX session (“How to Make Your User Experience Awesome and Your Business Users Happy”) we provided a spontaneous demo at the end of the session as half the attendees were interested in seeing SAP Screen Personas.
- We held our monthly SAP Screen Personas 3.0 Practitioner Forum live from TechEd with 60 people live and online.
The customer appreciation event at the Mob Museum – thank you to everyone who attended and to Mark for arranging such a great party.- Massive interest in integrating SAP Screen Personas into the Fiori launchpad and creating Fiori designs using SAP Screen Personas. We will provide more detailed information on this topic in the coming months.
- Several good conversations about using SAP Screen Personas to simplify SAP S/4HANA screens.
- Several customers expressed interest in using BUILD to prototype simplified screens. Using wireframes was a key part of the process for some recent SAP Screen Personas projects.
- It was great to see SAP Screen Personas in the 1st Basis and NIMBL booths on the show floor. These partners are building practices around the user experience, including SAP Screen Personas, SAP Fiori, and SAP S/4HANA.
Mythbusters
Question | Answer |
What is the future of SAP Screen Personas? Is it going away if SAP is moving to Fiori and S/4? | SAP Screen Personas is a key part of SAP’s UX strategy. It is built into the core of SAP and will be around for a long time. In the support matrix, we generally communicate a date three years after the most recent product release. So, the longest end-of-support date you will see is the end of the year three years from now. |
How does SAP Screen Personas fit with S/4? | Customers running the traditional GUIs in their on-premise SAP S/4HANA systems will be able to use SAP Screen Personas to simplify those screens. Sam Yen, SAP’s chief design officer spoke about this in his strategy talk. |
Should I use Fiori or SAP Screen Personas? | This is the wrong question. You should be asking when to use each solution, as most customers will use both together to deliver maximum user productivity with minimum development and IT resources. The answer depends on your unique needs and corporate UX strategy. Here is some general guidance:
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Why does SAP have Fiori and SAP Screen Personas? | SAP has both these solutions (along with several other UX tools) because they address different use cases. Fiori UX is the new user experience for SAP software. SAP Screen Personas is one tool that allows you to provide Fiori UX to your business users. |
Does SAP Screen Personas require Gateway? | No. Never has. Never will. |
If I launch a SAP Screen Personas flavor from the Fiori Launchpad on my mobile device, will it work? | SAP Screen Personas is built into the SAP GUI for HTML, and therefore is supported only for desktop browsers. We do not currently support Android or iPads or iPhones. But, some customers have created flavors that they use on Android devices. So, they run SAP Screen Personas on their Android tablet, but are not supported by SAP. Intel discussed how they are using SAP Screen Personas on a Windows tablet. This is a mobile scenario that is supported. |
Watch the 1-minute highlight video.
What next?
Watch the TechEd sessions you missed online.
Join the SAP Screen Personas Practitioner Forum to learn what other customers are doing.
Download SAP Screen Personas today to get started.
For the SAP Screen Personas product team, peter.spielvogel.
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