Looking Back – The SAP Design Guild in 2000
By Christine Wiegand & Gerd Waloszek, SAP Design Guild Team – February 16, 2001The start of a new year is always a good opportunity for a look ahead as well as a look back on the last year. Whereas our previous editorial put the "future goggles" on, this time we reflect on the first year of the SAP Design Guild. Preliminary work on the SAP Design Guild started in October 1999 at frogdesign in Austin, Texas. There we discussed the concept and structure of the Website and built a first prototype. The preparations lasted until April 2000, at which time the SAP Design Guild went public. In the meantime, guidelines and papers were collected, composed or rewritten and reformatted to fit the style of the SAP Design Guild. This preparative phase ensured that the SAP Design Guild could start well-stocked with a good supply of guidelines, papers and articles. During the rest of the year 2000, the SAP Design Guild continued to grow and evolve. While there was no major redesign of the site, a number of gradual changes and additions were made:
- We introduced editions (in the Innovation section) - collections of article centered around a "hot" topic in the UI field; the first edition was published in August 2000 and featured the topic "Workplace and MiniApps."
- The Opinion section, also introduced in August 2000, offers editorials, readers' contributions and design articles. This section changes approximately every there weeks; currently the archive offers a stock of about 20 articles covering a wide range of topics and design issues and is growing all the time.
- The Forum, again introduced in August 2000, is a discussion board for the design community.
- New guidelines (MiniApps, WAP, information-based Websites, touchscreens), plus major and minor updates of existing guidelines (MiniApps, IACs, R/3 Mini Style Guide) continue to enrich our extensive offerings.
- The Goodies section offers a variety of glossaries, a special on optical illusions and more. It was introduced in October 2000.
- When the Opinion and Forum sections were introduced in August 2000, the Methods section was merged into the Philosophy section to streamline the main menu of the SAP Design Guild.
- The end of the year 2000 culminated in the publishing of the second SAP Design Guild edition featuring the topic "reporting" and the last Opinion section of the year.
Now let's take a short look at last year's visitor statistics:
Of all the visitor sessions to the SAP Design Guild 35% were from the USA, while 65% originated from international and unknown sites. A larger percentage of the visitors came from SAP-related Websites, mostly located in the USA; exact numbers are, however, hard to calculate because the origin of many Web addresses is unknown.
Two thirds of external visitors were from 20 different countries. About 50% of these were from the USA, 25% from Germany, and the rest from different countries all over the world (mostly Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia). Thus, the SAP Design Guild played an important role as a "bridge" among Germany, the USA and other regions of the world in the design and interaction field.
The MiniApp Guidelines seem the be among the most visited pages. The Philosophy section, especially the articles from our external consultants Esslinger, Cooper and Holtzblatt, also attracted many visitors. Moreover, we have noticed the effectiveness of the News column and other highly visible references to articles - they also lead to a high number of hits for the respective articles.
As we do not know how many visitors other UI-related Websites have, it is difficult for us to evaluate these results. The SAP Design Guild is a Website for specialists, not for the masses, so we cannot expect millions of hits. But one this is sure, the large number of visitors shows that there is a need for such a Website. The Design Guild is important for the SAP community all over the world and brings the members of the SAP network together, no matter whether they are from the USA to Australia, from India to Germany. This has been the major impact of the SAP Design Guild.
One of the big challenges we face is making the SAP Design Guild "community life" flourish. For this, we need our visitors' suggestions for improving the site to increase its usefulness and interactivity. As a first step in learning more about our visitors and their needs, the much anticipated survey will be out soon. We are very much looking forward to seeing our visitors' responses and suggestions. So far, we are pleased about the mostly positive feedback we have received from all over the world.
Visitors' comments highlighted:
- Regarding the initiative itself: "a long awaited initiative from the computer science world",
- About the Website's philosophy "the philosophy of the Website is very impressive",
- In terms of the selection and quality of the content "I have visited the site and I'm very impressed;" "this is an interesting site;" "quite helpful;" "you did a good job in compiling the existing material into a good offering and to complement it with external submissions."
- About the visual design "I love your Website; it looks great (professional and great look and feel);" "Great Website! Congratulations to designers!"
Negative comments were received concerning our use of frames.
