As mentioned in the first part of this blog series, this blog post will cover the result screen of the SAP Screen Personas flavored version of the Accrual Cockpit. It was very hard to make huge UX improvements on this screen because it consists of just one big result table. Not many opportunities are here to impress users; the simple data rules! So, what can you think of in regards to increased user perception when you see a screen like this?
“Wow” you could say, but there is still room for improvement as you will see now.
Why overflood the user (and please remember that you are a goods recipient, an occasional user who access this tool from time to time) with such a bouquet of fields? You will ask yourself, “Are these fields really mandatory or important for me?” Simple answer – of course not! We have introduced a display variant for the result set just containing the relevant fields for this specific user group of goods recipients.
Ok, result set reduced, but do you really need all the remaining fields every time? The answer is again “No.” There are some fields you need every time in order to be able to maintain your accruals correctly, so why not display only those in a table with others you have in case you need to check or validate something.
We realized that by using the Personas scripting capabilities: When selecting a particular cell in the table grid and hit the Enter key, the corresponding values will be populated into the so-called “Master Data” box. The table becomes much more clearer – it contains all values you need every time you maintain accruals. If you need some more details: select a cell, hit enter, and you get required details. If you want to know how to achieve this, check the blog “How to access the selected row in a grid” by tobias.queck.
In addition, we also added a self-calculated field to the master data bow which is not part of the standard result set, but anyway valuable for the goods recipients. By using JavaScript functionality, we calculated the difference in days between the delivery date of the selected purchase order (PO) and today. How you can use JavaScript in Personas is explained in this blog: “How to go beyond the existing script actions”, author again Tobias Queck. Here is an example how I used the "Calculate in JavaScript" to calculate the difference between to dates:
if ( args.END.length == 0 )
// quit with not defined
{ args.mydays = "not def."; }
else {
// prepare current date / date one
var today = new Date();
var d1 = today.getDate();
var m1 = today.getMonth()+1;
var y1 = today.getFullYear();
temp = (m1 + "/" + d1 + "/" + y1);
var cfd = Date.parse(temp);
var date_one = new Date(cfd);
// prepare delivery date / date two
var arrDate = args.END.split('.')
var y2 = arrDate[2];
var m2 = arrDate[1];
var d2 = arrDate[0];
temp = (m2 + "/" + d2 + "/" + y2);
var cfd = Date.parse(temp);
var date_two = new Date(cfd);
// Calc Difference in days between date one and two
args.mydays = Math.round(Math.abs(date_one - date_two) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 ));
// Check if delivery date is greater than current date, then set days to zero
if ( (y2 > y1) || ((y2 = y1) && (m2 > m1)) || ((y2 = y1) && (m2 > m1) && (d2 > d1)) )
{
args.mydays = 0;
}
}
(I'm maybe not the experienced JavaScript developer, so please excuse if my script looks strange for some of you - But at least it working as expected :wink: )
With SAP Screen Personas, you can also define rules to highlight or hide specific cells or rows based on their values. In our interview sessions with the end-users, we’ve experienced that highlighting, in our case coloring, the background of all fields which need to be maintained by the target user group would make sense (we colored them green). There’s an extra dialog box for table/grid elements available where you can do so.
Of course, we used the same design and also display again additional info sources at the bottom, like direct links to reports, to wiki pages, and buttons for all required actions. The most prominent buttons, like Save or Check, we placed at their usual location, in the upper left corner.
This is all I had to share about the internal adoption of SAP Screen Personas in combination with the accrual cockpit. We simplified the way our target group will work with this tool in a dramatic way. It is now much more convenient for them to maintain their accruals and we’ve increased their perception and reduced the time they will spend with tool!
Hope you enjoyed the small series and I am looking forward to your valuable comments and feedback. Who knows, maybe there will be a 3rd part to the blog sometime :smile:
Make sure to visit the SAP Runs SAP booth at the TechEd Showfloor for great discussions on how SAP Runs SAP internally and, of course, for a SAP Screen Personas demo! More details can be found in Eileen's Blog.
PS: Use this link to retrieve a lot of really helpful Personas manuals.
Best regards,
Steffen Weber
Please connect with me on Twitter for more updates.