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User Productivity at SAP Labs

By Oliver Mainka, SAP Labs, Palo Alto & Durga Prasad V, SAP Labs, Bangalore – November 19, 2004

In addition to its Walldorf-based user interface designers in Germany, SAP maintains two User Productivity groups at SAP Labs Palo Alto and SAP Labs Bangalore. Linking SAP development with the American market, is the central theme of User Productivity in Palo Alto, California. This group focuses on two things: The first is to provide UI designs, such as for new user experiences in reporting and analytics. The second is to closely link SAP development to the needs and opportunities of the American market. User Productivity Bangalore sees its role as a hub for innovation. It is a fast-growing team in a fast-growing lab, focuses on designing world-class user interfaces for world-class products, and has filed almost 20 percent of all patent applications from SAP Labs Bangalore.

In this article, both groups present their share in improving the user productivity of SAP applications.

 

SAP User Experience Group at SAP Labs Palo Alto, USA

There are four distinctive value points to have a representation of SAP's central usability group in the U.S. in general and in the Silicon Valley in particular.

Knowledge Broker

The first one is that we have a significant group of application User Interface Designers (UIDs) in the U.S. The central group acts as a knowledge broker, educating the decentral colleagues on new standards, tools, and methods. In the other direction we collect best practices which in turn can be shared with UIDs worldwide.

UI Design Talents

The second one is the pool of exceptional UI design talent in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is very interesting for SAP to tap into the local skill set, which has been built around and with all the large, established software companies and small, entrepeneurial startups. The majority of SAP development occurs in Germany (with India becoming the second-largest development location) and issues of distributed work between designers and solution managers and developers have to be properly addressed, yet it is attractive for SAP to hire unique talent here which is not available elsewhere.

Proximity to SAP's US Customers

The third value point is the proximity to SAP's US customers and also non-customers, which drive SAP's solution portfolio with new demands for helping them to perform innovative business processes. Many new ways to conduct business are invented in the US or applied first here on a larger scale, such as electronic marketplaces, self-services, or the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Basically all of these directions have some influence on the User Experience. We conduct extensive research with US companies, interviewing and observing users, and also test SAP software for usability issues. As a specific activity, the conferences of our American SAP User Group (ASUG) have become a prime opportunity to quickly test SAP software with many users and is highly regarded by our customers as a cornerstone of influencing SAP.

Unique Knowledge and Research Pool

Last but not least we recognize that the majority of any work in this world on User Experience is happening in the US Many researchers, gurus, universities, competitors, start-ups, "de facto standard setters", and analysts push the envelope of User Experience. SAP is tapping into this unique knowledge and research pool and connecting entities in the U.S. to the appropriate open issues at SAP.

 

SAP User Experience Group at SAP Labs Bangalore, India

The User Productivity group at Bangalore as an integral part of worldwide user productivity organization focuses on designing world class user interfaces for world class products. Through this endeavor the team has evolved into a hub for innovation with our colleague Aurobinda Pradhan having the distinction of filing almost 20% of all patent applications filed from SAP Labs Bangalore.

Mobile UI Design

The team has developed deep expertise in designing the user experience for mobile business applications running on devices ranging from laptops to PDA's. One of the highlights of our work in this area was the definition of reusable UI Building Blocks for all PDA based mobile applications. The UI building blocks were applied to several different mobile usage scenarios like field sales & service and tested with users at ASUG. The team is currently engaged in refining the UI building blocks to include on user feedback and achieve closer alignment with building blocks defined for desktop based applications.

While mobile UI design continues to be a focus area at Bangalore, several UI designers are working in distributed teams designing UI's for mid market solutions.

The other main areas of operation for the user productivity team in Bangalore are accessibility test services and knowledge transfer.

Accessibility Test Services

The accessibility test lab in Bangalore provides accessibility test and validation services for multiple GUI technologies including SAP GUI for Windows and HTML. Based on the experience garnered from extensive testing the lab provides crucial inputs into the refinement of the product standards for accessibility and the underlying technology frameworks.

Knowledge Transfer

A bouquet of initiatives have been unveiled under the Product Innovation Lifecycle rollout project at SAP Labs India, which aim to create a user focused development organization through the development of UI & Accessibility champions. These initiatives run as a pilot in SAP Labs India aim to empower selected individuals across the length and breadth of the development organization by providing them with the requisite training and coaching besides providing the long term support needed to nurture this community.

We also play a major role at SAP Labs India in the efforts to great a customer focused development organization.

Catch them young: One of our efforts for creating a user centered development organization involves educating all new inductees into SAP Labs India on the importance of usability and accessibility. These trainings go on to provide some basic tools for designing and evaluating a user interface.

 

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