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SAP Helps Apple Keep iPhone Away from Bad Guys – A User Experience Perspective

By Janaki Kumar, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – July 5, 2011

Janaki KumarIn June 2011, SAP's Global Trade Services (GTS) version 10 successfully exited ramp-up and became generally available. This is a major achievement for the team since this release is full of break through innovation based on complex customer and requirements, and a thoughtfully redesigned user experience that hides much of this complexity from the end-user. This article tells the story of the user experience team's contribution to this milestone.

 

 

The World Is Flat but Trade is Complex

In today's world of globalization, most companies do business with customers, suppliers, distributors, contractors and other business partners from around the world. Free Trade agreements such as NAFTA have accelerated this trend. However, the old adage, there is no such thing as a free lunch applies to free trade as well. Constantly evolving regulations combined with the heightened focus on national security post 9/11 place a heavy burden on companies' supply chains. Failure to comply with complex and country-specific rules and regulations result in costly delays, negative publicity and heavy penalties. SAP's Global Trade Services (GTS) offers a solution to over 1000 customers in 70 countries addressing these regulatory and national security concerns, while helping them stay competitive in a global business environment.

Trade is complex

Fugure 1: Trade is complex (click image for larger version)

 

Trade Compliance Officers Are People too

When the User Experience engagement began, GTS faced the classic innovator's dilemma. The product had a large customer base and the development team had built a robust set of features and functions, but there was a perception in the field and the market that it was too complex. One perspective was that because the business processes and regulations the product supported were complex, and the Trade Compliance Officers were expert users who were paid to deal with this complexity. The User Experience team held a different perspective. We believed that Trade Compliance Officers were people too, and they deserved to have an elegant user experience that meets their business needs.

 

Know Thy User

We pulled together a core team: Solution Manager Ben Ceaser, Development Architect Torsten Zube and User Experience expert Jai Godara and embarked on a journey to redesign GTS. The first order of business was to determine for ourselves the specific issues that customers had with the existing implementation. Despite close and long-standing relationships with customers, the GTS team did not have a lot of direct interaction with end-users. Most communication was with customer IT staff or compliance managers and many critical details about who was using GTS and how they worked were being obscured as a result. In order to learn more about the end-users, their background and their motivations, we conducted a survey of the GTS customer base. We observed a wide variation in the end-user titles (Trade Operations Officer, Import Specialist, Export Analyst etc) and departments that they were part of (Logistics, Shipping, Finance, Order Processing etc).

Frequency visualization of end-user titles

Figure 2: Frequency visualization of end-user titles

We conducted various types of user research activities such as site-visits, structured interviews, lab-based and remote usability studies to observe end users using the product. With key logistical support from Carl Lane of the Customer Advisory Office, the team interviewed and trailed users at Apple, Jabil, HP, Eli Lily, and SAP's internal export compliance team. These co-innovation partners provided us with feedback throughout the project and were important contributors to its success.

In addition to giving us valuable information, this research had some unexpected benefits. While it was painful to watch end-users struggling with confusing menus, flows, hidden functionality and overwhelming quantity of poorly organized information, it established a common understanding of the importance of User Experience in the team. The team felt a connection with the end-users and was committed to making their daily jobs easier.

 

User-Centered Design to Catch Bad Guys

With renewed energy, the team, led by UX, applied the principles of good design to build the new UI. Based on input from the product team, we selected Sanctioned Party List screening (SPL) as the highest priority area to focus our design efforts on. SPL screening helps companies comply with the many regulations that prohibit companies from doing business with terrorists, money launderers, drug dealers and other "bad guys". This seems simple enough, but in reality it is far from it. Companies have to check every customer, vendor and business document (Purchase orders, Sales Orders, Invoices etc) against more than fifty constantly changing lists of Sanctioned Parties published by various government agencies in countries around the globe. If the business partner's name or address attributes match any of the "bad guys" on the lists, the system blocks the transaction from proceeding in the backend system. GTS then presents the details a human, who must decide if the system determined match is accurate or if it is a false positive. The trouble is that it can be difficult to determine if the person truly is a "bad guy"! Users have to research the problem and look to various information sources before they can make their determination. Meanwhile, they are under competing pressures to both ensure compliance and make quick decisions so as not to block fulfillment of orders and impact sales. Imagine SPL processing of iPhone sales during the Christmas season!

Figures 3-6: Sanctioned party list screening explained

 

Less Is More

After observing users, we learned that the essence of this process was a simple question the user must answer: "Is my business partner the same as the bad guy matched by the system?" It became clear to the team that the most effective way to support the primary user objectives of productivity and accuracy was to streamline the process to the fewest possible steps and simplify the user interface to focus on only the most important information. Alternative workflows and non-critical information were relegated to alternative screens. Users told us clearly and consistently that the three most important data elements were name, address and links to regulatory citations, and that any other information was extraneous. As a result, the focus of the design was to ensure that these elements were prominent and readable.

To ensure that extra fields didn't clutter the UI and interfere with the user's ability to focus, the team took a data driven approach. Analysis of more than 30,000 SPL (bad guys) records indicated that 87% of the bad guys had between 1-3 names or aliases and 1-2 known addresses. This allowed the team to design the UI to accommodate 3 names and 2 addresses without scrolling or pagination and thereby making users much more productive.

Figure 7: Name and address records quantity per SPL master – occurrence distribution (top 90%) (click image for larger version)

Management sponsorship was also a key success factor. They endorsed investment beyond just a new user interface and empowered and trusted the team to make whatever enhancements were necessary to improve the usability. This allowed the team to implement changes to streamline underlying processes and improve system and user performance.

 

Agile UX Design

Our primary design challenge was to present a consolidated set of meaningful information to the compliance officer in an easy to understand manner that can help them make their decisions quickly and without error. We designed the information architecture, developed use cases, designed business process flows, screen mock-ups and prototypes in close collaboration with Solution Management and Development.

In the meantime, the product team made a few decisions. They decided to adopt the Lean methodology for development and build the new UI on WebDynpro ABAP based on the Business Suite guidelines so that it would be consistent both with other applications in GRC suite as well as with renovated processes in the Business Suite.

Use cases and process flows were continuously validated with end-users and simplified based on their input. Design mockups and prototypes were created, validated and iterated upon by the product team following the user-centered design methodology. The SAP Wiki was used extensively for documentation of use cases and process flows, which facilitated collaboration with team members in Palo Alto, Walldorf, Banglore and Shanghai.

GTS collaboration Wiki and process flows

Figure 8: GTS collaboration Wiki and process flows (click image for larger version)

 

Screen Examples

Figure 9: Screen examples (click image for larger version)

 

Impact

The finished design has been extremely well received by end-users, but its impact extends to driving customer adoption of the new release. "The SPL redesign is the MAJOR justification for the upgrade to GTS 10.0" said Kevin McCollom, Head of GTS Solution Management. " It is sincerely wowing everyone who sees it."

The improved user experience is also making GTS easier to sell. "From a sales perspective, the new GTS User Interface puts us in a much better position to capture the buying audience and position our solution" said Paul Pessutti, Vice President of the Finance Center of Excellence. "In past sales cycles, business users would object to GTS because they perceived it as too complicated. Now they can get past the look and feel and see the innovation and functionality and are much more comfortable endorsing GTS."

 

More Testimonials

With the help of the Customer Advisory Council, the team set up regular validation sessions with the co-innovation partners and solicited feedback all through the design process.

Here is customer feedback on our validation sessions:

  • "I just wanted you to know that we appreciated SAP providing us the opportunity to participate in this activity. I think it was good for both Apple & SAP. The Apple business folks were appreciative to share their GTS processes & desires with SAP, and I think the SAP folks did a great job of conducting the observations & interviews. It's the first SAP User Experience sessions I have ever been a part of, and I was impressed. I think these are good ways of reaching out to customers and giving them a feeling of being able to truly influence the next generation of functionality. The user experience of any application is such a strong factor of the overall business satisfaction of any solution, and these types of collaborative interactions are one way of supporting improved opportunities for co-innovation between the software provider (SAP) and customer (Apple). We should do more of this. We look forward to continuing to participate in the subsequent phases of the GTS journey to the new generation solution.
    Besides the SAP people directly involved with this particular observation, please express our thanks to other appropriate SAP leadership."
    (Cliff Story, Director, Global Design Team, Apple)

The following are some quotes from our end-users:

  • "It rocks! I like the one stop shopping of data. It presents all the information we have to mine from multiple places."
    (Conner, Compliance specialist, Apple, Inc)
  • "I love it…It is such a drastic improvement over the existing design."
    (Steve, Jabil)
  • "I like that you don't have to click out and click back in every time you release a block. It makes a huge difference to our productivity…You listened to us."
    (Maxine Curry, Manager Global Export Compliance, Apple)

Quotes from internal stakeholders on the user experience engagement:

  • "We would not have reached this step without the great collaboration of your team! This was a great experience for us (development) to work with Jai (our User Experience expert) and now it is a great experience for our customers to work with our new SPL UI!"
    (Torsten Zube, Development Lead GTS)
  • "This project has completely changed how I approach software design. Instead of first fixating on the flow of data between the backend systems or the details of the regulatory requirements, my initial focus is on identifying who the user is and what it is that they're trying to accomplish."
    (Ben Ceaser, Product Manager GTS)

 

Conclusion

Designing business software for specialized domains requires specialized knowledge and expertise. The User-Centered Design process enabled the team to understand the needs of the users and develop a deep empathy for their daily tasks, information needs and business goals. By applying sound design principles, collaborating effectively with the other stakeholders, and listening to our users, the GTS team was able to create a product that resonates in the market place and delights the end-user.

 

 

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