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Editorials 2000

 

Two Years of SAP Design Guild – The Baby is Up and Running...

By Christine Wiegand, Ramona Winkler, & Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, SAP User Experience, SAP Design Guild Team – April 18, 2002

This month, the SAP Design Guild celebrates its second anniversary – an ideal opportunity for looking back, taking stock, and considering the future of the SAP Design Guild.

 

Looking Back...

The SAP Design Guild started off as a resource for guidelines and papers describing SAP's way of designing usable software applications. Consequently, the "core" of the SAP Design Guild was the Construction section, which was structured according to the phases of the design processes, that is, Analyze, Design, Implement, and Verify. After a while, we found such a "resources" concept to be too static for a Website. After all, there is seldom daily news to announce; thus, we tried to find an approach that lies between a news site and a static resources site. A magazine-like style with information that would be updated within different time frames seemed appropriate to us for exploiting the power of the SAP Design Guild's offerings. We also intended to establish a design community, where UI and design people have the chance to share their knowledge and experience, and exchange information.

The Innovation and Opinion sections, and the Forum as a chat board, were the cornerstones of this magazine-style approach. The Innovation section is a stage where different authors publish articles on a certain topic about twice a year. The Opinion section – now integrated within the Community section – offers editorials, design articles, and readers' contributions on a more frequent basis.

In 2001, the SAP Design Guild underwent some structural changes that culminated in a new, more accessible design and structure, which went live at the beginning of this year. There is a more clear-cut distinction between the "resources" part and the "community" part of the SAP Design Guild in the form of separate sections Resources and Community. A third section named Home & Services has been added. It provides a service infrastructure for the visitors of the SAP Design Guild. Here, visitors can find answers to questions, such as, "What is the SAP Design Guild?", "What is SAP?", or "How can I print articles and guidelines?" In its Info Area, you can find general information about the SAP Design Guild, tips for using it, an FAQ, SAP-related links, as well as a news and a newsletter archive.

 

Status Quo – What Have We Achieved?

What does the SAP Design Guild has to offer after two years of collecting material? Currently, it offers about 25 guidelines and "book"-like articles, and about 130 articles on different topics. Four editions have been published in the Innovation section, the latest covering "accessibility." We also included the original Philosophy section as "Edition Zero" here. The Goodies are a supplement to SAP's guidelines and papers in the Resources section; they offer interesting, useful information: You can find links to other design resources on the Web, a book list, links to design and UI "gurus," glossaries, as well as other goodies like optical illusions. Moreover, there is an Events page in the Community section, where visitors find links and information on upcoming events in the UI field, such as CHI 2002. By the way, there are CHI reports from last year's CHI in the Readers' Contributions corner – and there will be new reports from the current CHI because two members of the SAP Design Guild team will attend. Take the chance to talk to them at CHI 2002.

One of the "weaker" aspects of the SAP Design Guild Website is the community aspect. It's still mostly a one-way channel, that is, the SAP Design Guild team offers its information, while visitors digest it. There are various possible reasons for this, for example, the SAP UI world may be too small to keep such a community going, or there are already many well-established UI and design communities on the Web. Therefore, we ask our visitors for suggestions on how we can strengthen the community life on the SAP Design Guild Website; comments and ideas are welcome. Please send them to sapdesignguild@sap.com.

Finally, after two years of anonymity, the SAP Design Guild team shows its face with a photo of the team. We put this photo somewhere in the SAP Design Guild a few weeks ago – perhaps you may want to search for it – it's a good way of getting to know our offerings...

The SAP Design Guild Team

Figure 1: The SAP Design Guild Team – Christine Wiegand, Gerd Waloszek, and Ramona Winkler (from left to right)

All in all, the SAP Design Guild has received mainly positive feedback on the concept, design, structure, and content of the Website. Criticism often related to more technical aspects, such as the use of frames and problems with using the site on small computer screens. We addressed these issues with our new design and received positive feedback on that. The SAP Design Guild has been listed on quite a number of Websites and we also found that articles have been featured in the news section of some Websites. So, the SAP Design Guild is there, it has been recognized, and we hope that it can keep the impetus that it had in the past.

 

Outlook

Let us conclude this editorial with a very brief look into the future of the SAP Design Guild.

As we have just finished revamping the SAP Design Guild Website, there will probably be no major structural changes in the near future. This year, we may test the option of transferring the Website to a knowledge management system. Currently, the SAP Design Guild is a strictly "handmade" Website – with all the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach.

The next edition of the SAP Design Guild will be published in the middle of this year, but we cannot give any firm date yet. We plan to center this edition around the topic "collaboration." The idea of using computers for group collaboration is not new but never gained the momentum that was once expected from it. Recently, however, it has become an important issue in the portal field: Collaboration tools are added to portals in order to increase their usefulness not only for individual users but also for teams. The SAP Design Guild team is eager to learn more about that topic since every edition has extended our own horizons. This time, the SAP Design Guild Website itself may again benefit from the insights that we gain with the upcoming edition (as was the case with the accessibility edition).

 

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