Many SAP customers have already reviewed the SAP UX Strategy to understand how SAP will continue to improve its user experience portfolio from a technology, application and even service perspective.
Based on SAP’s UX strategy your next question might be: “How can I start from here to improve the user experience (UX) in my company?”
The answer is: “Start with creating your own UX strategy”.
The reason is obvious. Customer environments are different and so are the requirements of their user base. As with other strategies, such as a corporate strategy or an overall IT strategy, there can’t be this one document from SAP that explains how a customer should handle user experience. Honestly: You have to ask your users, rather than SAP, what they need.
How do I start building my own UX strategy?
As with any strategy planning, you should start by answering the following questions:
- What is my overall vision and when do I want to turn this vision into reality?
- What are my main missions needed to support my vision?
- What are (very) rough KPIs that confirm (at least to me) that my missions and vision have successfully been executed and reached?
This is the first cornerstone of your UX strategy planning and should be wisely defined, even if they reflect a high level view. For instance your existing corporate and IT strategies might already provide borderlines or requirements that need to be incorporated in your UX vision and missions.Of course, you might need to adapt the missions slightly over time, when you get more insight from various strategy drivers.
What drives my customer UX Strategy?I already mentioned the SAP UX Strategy in the beginning, and yes, this can be seen as one parameter that influences a customer UX strategy. Nevertheless, there are many more drivers to consider, where most of them are customer specific and obviously should be rated as most important.To get an idea of these drivers, here are some examples:
- Existing customer strategies (e.g. company strategy, IT strategy, SAP strategy)
- Business requirements
- Current user environment and user pain points
- Existing IT landscape (including SAP landscape)
- Existing technical know-how
In addition to these customer-specific drivers, there are additional parameters that can also influence the customer strategy such as:
- SAP UX Strategy as mentioned before
- Availability of technical options provided by SAP
- Availability of business solutions provided by SAP
- Availability of technical options and business solutions from SAP Partners
What are my benefits by creating my own UX strategy?
I think the customer-specific drivers that are mentioned above are already a good reason. At least to ensure your user experience activity is aligned with important elements such as your company and IT strategy and supports them well.But there are more reasons for a customer UX strategy. If you want to take the satisfaction of your users serious, make them a central part of your project. Take the customer UX strategy to not only satisfy your existing strategies but even more importantly to satisfy your users. With a well-planned UX strategy that incorporates your users and all necessary steps to make them satisfied with their software environment surely will result in additional values like:
- Increased data quality
- Higher user adoption rates
- Increased efficiency for each user which results in a higher productivity.
Is it possible to measure these values in money? Yes, it is. Just think of the necessary invests to fix data errors and maintain environments with low adoption. Or imagine how users can make their company successful by focusing on their business processes rather than a user experience that makes them slow or inefficient.
How you can continue from here and how SAP can help?
SAP already provides help for customers interested in improving their user experience.
Self-Service
With the SAP EA Explorer, customers have the chance to easily investigate their technical options. Even more, the Explorer unveils the relations between these options. If you always wanted to know how SAP NetWeaver Business Client relates to the SAP Application Server or what the difference between SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 is, the SAP UX Explorer provides the answers.
We are also currently expanding the content of SAP UX Explorer towards UX project supporting material and knowledge that is aligned with other services from SAP.
Consulting and Support Services
Obviously, a comprehensive UX strategy sooner or later requires more than just using a SAP self-service tool. Project planning, user research, UI adaptations and more require involving people. In the case that you don’t have the required skills available or simply don’t want to invest with your own people, SAP can help you with a rich set of services in all phases of such a project.
UX Community
Last but not least, there is the SAP UX community that provides a place for an open dialog about user experience, providing insights far beyond the technologies and projects towards user experience, design, methods and much more.
-----> If you like, continue with Part 2: Creating your UX strategy <-----
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Alternatively, you can send us an e-mail to: eaexplorer@sap.com.
Talk to you soon,
JJ
Jürgen Jakowski (SAP) – Twitter: @JJComment
Note: This article was originally posted on the SAP User Experience Community
