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SAP Usability Activities at ASUG 2001

By Beth Russell, SAP AG – July 27, 2001

 

"SAP seems to be aggressively catering to its customers. The usability tests are testimony to this."

This is just part of the positive feedback the SAP Usability Group received in reaction to the Usability Activities it conducted at the recent ASUG (American SAP Users' Group) Annual Conference & Vendor Fair, May 20-23rd in Miami Beach, Florida. A team of approximately 40 SAP developers, product managers, and usability experts conducted 250+ one-on-one test sessions with SAP customers, partners, employees, and prospects. These sessions gave ASUG members the opportunity to test and give feedback on some of the latest SAP development projects. They gave developers the chance to speak directly with users and bring back improvements, design ideas, and unanswered questions to their respective development groups.

Tests were run in a variety of product areas:

  • mySAP Business Information Warehouse (BW)
  • mySAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • mySAP Financials
  • mySAP Mobile Solutions
  • mySAP Marketplace
  • Enterprise Portals

Each test session lasted approximately 60 minutes, and entailed a brief introduction to the test scenario, lengthy hands-on work by the tester, and wrap up. For example, in the CRM area users were asked to take on the role of a sales representative or sales manager to "perform his daily tasks of checking and creating activities, opportunities, quotations, and orders using a personal digital assistant (PDA)."

test session

Feedback received included praise for new directions that SAP is taking, but also constructive criticism about navigation, interface terminology, icons, sort and search functionality, and general design and visualization issues. Some general comments from testers:

  • "(The application) needs some work to make it more intuitive in terms of what tabs contain what information."
  • "(I) feel it's a good idea to get the best navigation techniques for end users."
  • "Keep doing this! It's a great barometer for workability of your products."
  • "Excellent chance to interact with designers to make product friendlier."
  • "I think this is fabulous! A great opportunity to gain information about upcoming products and give my feedback in advance! I plan to take advantage of this every chance I get."
  • "Great idea - very useful - better than client demos."

photo of a team member of SAP Usability team at ASUG

 

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