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SAP Pushes User Productivity

By Christine Wiegand & Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – November 19, 2004

Decorateive imageWhen Gerd was a kid, his father liked to ask riddles, such as this one: "What's the difference between a bird?" With Gerd and his brother looking at their father in total confusion, he smiled and explained: "There is none. Both legs have the same length, particularly the right one." Let's make the riddle a bit easier and more relevant to the topic of this Website: "What's the difference between 'user productivity' and 'User Productivity'?" Is that still too difficult? Maybe, but this time we can offer a path to the solution: If you look at our new edition on User Productivity you will find the answer to the question and an explanation of what both of these terms are all about. We will answer the riddle here for impatient visitors – but at a price: Only after a short overview of the new edition. For the first time, a SAP Design Guild edition has been published in cooperation with SAP INFO. The SAP Design Guild team would like to say "thank-you" to the editors of both the print and the online versions of the magazine for this fruitful cooperation.

The new "User Productivity" edition comprises three sections: The first section is introduced by our leading article, in which Johannes Gillar (SAP INFO) interviewed Matthias Vering, vice president of User Productivity at SAP. Vering explains how fresh design solutions help SAP users to work more productively. In a key statement, he says:

"I see user productivity as the new touchstone. What we're doing is not an end in itself: The solutions we make are meant to be tools to help employees do their work as quickly and efficiently as possible. We say, people who use our solutions are entitled to expect three 'E's: effectiveness, efficiency, and experience. A solution is effective if it's easy to find what you need. It is efficient if you can get your task done quickly. And it's a good experience if it's fun to work with."

In the interview, Vering touches on a number of relevant issues, such as SAP's UI First process, accessibility, the total cost of ownership (TCO), and the importance of knowledge management. The leading article is complemented with interviews and articles, most of them from external authors. In another interview from SAP INFO, Bill Swanton, an AMR vice president for research, and his colleague Judy Sweeney, an AMR research director, talk about how and why ERP systems are morphing from highly complex systems to user-centric, business process-oriented designs. They come up with the notion of a user-friendly enterprise. Finally, Steve Dean, ASUG director of influence, explains in an interview how opportunities such as Usability Activities give ASUG members – SAP customers in North America – a chance to shape the direction of future SAP products and services, while enabling SAP to hear direct feedback on usability. In addition, Karen Holtzblatt, Incontext Enterprises, presents a concise overview of the Contextual Design approach, which she developed together with Hugh Beyer. The last article in this section demonstrates how increased user productivity helps to reduce the TCO.

The second section is devoted to the teams within the User Productivity group itself and their main task areas. This section is introduced by an overview article that briefly presents each team and its tasks. Further articles cover the individual teams and their missions. In addition, there is an article presenting UI First, SAP's new way of placing users at the center of the design process, and another one of SAP's groundbreaking, pattern-based approaches to building user interfaces efficiently. The edition is rounded off with three articles on innovative approaches to user interfaces and usability testing. In both sections, we also share articles with the online version of SAP INFO, such as Sabine Höfler's discussion of the Human Computer Interaction program that was initiated by SAP Research. This program is conducting research into innovative interfaces, new access modes, and solutions for intercultural issues.

Returning to our riddle: Were you able to solve it? It's maybe still too hard: "User Productivity" is the name of the group at SAP that takes care of "user productivity," and both are, as you now know, the topic of our new edition.

We hope that you will enjoy the new Edition on user productivity and User Productivity.

 

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