Initial Situation

Until the Middle of the 90's and Beyond...

Already by the middle of the Nineties it was clear that, as a result of SAP’s strong growth, the UEC could no longer cover all the requirements for these usability services. At the same time, however, it was becoming more and more of a necessity to integrated usability expertise into the development process because of the large numbers of new staff taken on and the considerable functional enhancements made to R/3. One approach to a solution consisted of building up a network of usability contact people in the development departments. Monthly meetings were arranged for the purpose of an exchange between the development departments and the UEC so that, for example, standardization questions could be discussed from an application development point of view and corresponding demands could be made of the UEC. For its part, the UEC used these meetings in order to obtain feedback on draft standards and have new rules approved, because the contacts were also responsible for the transfer of knowledge to the software engineers.

In spite of these different approaches, it was not possible to change the prevailing perception of the software ergonomics group as "Style Guide editors" among the software engineers. Consequently, usability was interpreted by the software engineers exclusively as the application of these rules. The leverage of the usability services was too weak to embed the topic in the consciousness of the software engineers. The use of the network of usability contact people didn’t bring the expected improvements either. The network approach alone was not enough to supply the development process with software ergonomics methods and systematically integrate them. The reasons were often that the contacts fulfilled this role in addition to other activities that had a higher priority. Moreover, the attention of the staff was not focused primarily on the usability of the applications.

Instead, there was a strong focus in the development groups on improving existing functionality and programming new functionality. This pushed the design of the user interface and its user friendliness for future users into the background. On account of the tight schedule dictated by the closely set milestones in the development process, there was a tendency to leave the active design of the user interface until the implementation phase. As a result, this was not viewed as an integral part of the overall design of the application; instead, it was regarded as an additional activity for the development group.

In addition to this, there had been a failure to center all activities systematically around users and their specific requirements. Instead, input channels were used that were all directed toward the IT staff or management of customers, such as focus groups, discussion groups and online development requests. Customer orientation in the sense of the integration of the IT management and the R/3 implementation team in the process was thus very marked. However, there was a failure to analyze adequately the context in which the software was used and to find out users’ requirements from users themselves. As a result of the increasingly indirect channels to the development groups, individual software engineers had no direct appreciation of the context in which the software was used and the tasks for which the application was intended.

Before EnjoySAP, only once the application was delivered did users theoretically have the opportunity to give feedback via an online feedback system on the problems they encountered when using the software. During the development cycle, an optional usability test was the only opportunity available to development groups to obtain active user feedback. Since the development process was nearing completion by this stage, the feedback from users could not realistically be incorporated until the next development cycle.

Against the background of this state of affairs within the company, a new perception of the market took effect at the end of 1997. It emerged in discussions that key accounts expected greater ease of use and lower training requirements from R/3 in the future. Since the functional scope of R/3 was already consolidated, they regarded improvements to the user interface as the best way of improving the total cost of ownership for their R/3 Systems.

Thus, it was SAP’s customers, in the end, who attached a high priority to the subject of usability. Users’ increasing right to have a say is compelling customers, when selecting software, to focus not just on the support offered to its business processes but also on its usability (see [Gebauer 1994, page 69ff] and [EC 1990]).

In order to take these changed customer requirements into account, the SAP management board decided at the beginning of 1998 to launch the enterprise-wide EnjoySAP initiative. The aim was to set new standards with a completely revised R/3 user interface in Release 4.6.

Source:  EnjoySAP - Success Factors