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Former Member
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Guy Kawasaki recently delivered a lecture at Stanford talking about his new book – ‘Enchantment’. During the lecture he explained one of his theories – DICEE theory.

Listening to his explanation of the theory, it seemed tailor-made for those of us now focusing on SAP mobility. As this market is still – for the most part – an emerging market, it’s important to ensure that the products we create have the following features:

 

DEPTH: This refers to the features and functionality of the product. It’s important to anticipate as many different features as possible and provide this functionality to users in advance – many users haven’t had much experience of using similar applications (in a business context) and so cannot easily articulate what it is that they actually want.

Making a product ‘deep’ does not mean forcing users to work through many screens to get to the desired result, or bombarding them with tabs and buttons. It means looking at the base product, and determining how users will want to use it as their experience with such applications matures.

 

INTELLIGENCE: The product should make the user feel that the creator understands their problem as well as, or better than, they do. It’s essential to understand what problem(s) the user is facing that are being addressed by the new product.

And different users may have different problems – so this information needs to be derived from as wide an audience as possible.

Take for example Google Maps – some people use it as a GPS system when driving, others use it to find the nearest convenience store when in a new place. Both are valid problems – and both are addressed equally well by the same application.

 

COMPLETENESS: The new product should not be considered as just a download or a digital installation. The totality of the product includes the product itself, support, documentation and enhancements.

Just as we have been delivering complete ERP solutions for years with all of the above, we need to do the same for our new mobility products.

 

EMPOWERING: Users should feel more creative, more productive, and experience joy when using the product.

For the most part SAP Mobility solutions are about productivity. They are about empowering employees to be able to perform key business tasks outside of the traditional office environment.

But the ‘joy’ aspect should not be under-estimated. Users do genuinely enjoy using their smartphones or tablet devices to do these tasks. They will even show other people the applications and explain what they do – we’ve never seen anyone do that with a standard SAP transaction at a family barbecue!

 

ELEGANCE: In the words of Guy Kawasaki – “Great products have a great user interface”. This is so true. At the end of the day, most of our users do not really care that we have a beautifully coded BAPI running in the back-end system. They care about what the application looks like, how easy and intuitive it is to use, and how it performs.

SAP Mobility requires a whole new skill-set – User Experience (UX). UX skills are very different to the skills that most of us have developed over years of working with SAP. Persona modelling, colour analysis, card-sorting and storyboarding are just some of the concepts that need to be understood to deliver a really great experience for the users.

It’s never too late to learn these skills – but when starting out on SAP mobility projects, do ensure that there is a strong UX consultant on board to guide the way…

 

From now on, we’ll be performing a ‘DICEE’ check on all of our SAP Mobility solutions…and there’ll be a copy of the ‘Enchantment’ book in our office library very soon…

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