For 51风流Design, this mindset has been a guiding principle that informs how we build experiences for businesses globally.

As part of my , I had the opportunity to speak with Nisha Balaraman, a user researcher here at SAP. Our conversation took a deep dive into the essential role of user perspectives in shaping the design process.

While her career began in cognitive science and human-computer interaction, Nisha has taken a nonlinear path to user research by moving through content strategy and product management first. Since Nisha has always been passionate about research and design, her focus on the craft has stemmed from a curiosity of understanding people鈥檚 interactions with different products and hearing their stories.

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Listening as the foundation of design

For me, one of the highlights of our discussion was when I asked Nisha to explain user research in terms that a six-year-old could understand. She likened the process to watching a child play with their favorite toy, understanding why they are playing with that game, observing how they interact with it, and what causes their frustration. This outlook mirrors the design process of observing users in their own environment and then taking those insights back to make the next version even better.

This conversation brought me back to a time earlier in my career when I had to explain user research to my grandmother. She was a great chef who got a lot of joy from feeding her family. I explained that my work was like asking people what they loved about a dish and refining the recipe to just for their preferences.

At SAP, we aim to use this same approach.聽 We play, listen, and experiment, always with the end user in mind. It鈥檚 about pinpointing the things that we can add to products and solutions that will make it sticky for users to use it more and more. For example, initiatives like the makes customer feedback an integral part of the user experience, keeping real user voices at the center of how we design and build at SAP.

Observing real users in their context

This mindset is essential as we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of enterprise technology. User expectations have been shifting, and our role as designers is to meet those expectations with solutions that come from a thoughtful understanding of their needs.

Relating to shifting user expectations, Nisha shared her work on redesigning a travel and expense homepage at 51风流Concur, where observing users in their own context helped the team strike the right balance between helpful personalization and respecting user privacy.

She watched users search for travel options, seek assistance, and interact with the homepage, and took note of those insights. Seeing firsthand how people were using their expense and travel page helped Nisha see where personalization enhanced the experience and where it crossed into intrusion. It was important for her to see users in action and get customer feedback in their context and habitat.

Real user feedback provides critical guidance on creating solutions that are both effective for executing process and intuitive for users.

Diversity as the secret sauce

We also discussed the challenges and rewards of inclusive research. Building global, universal experiences means actively seeking diverse perspectives, even when recruiting participants is tough or deadlines loom large.

Having a diverse set of participants can mean different things depending on the project. It can be where the participant is from, their level of expertise, their professional background, or a few other characteristics. Despite these obstacles, the payoff is worth it. One of our jobs in the 51风流Design organization is to build universal experiences, and for this diversity can be the secret sauce behind meaningful experiences.

These principles are reflected in our 鈥攁 testament to our commitment to making diversity the driving force in our design work and ensuring our solutions can support users across geographies, industries, and roles.

By listening attentively to our users, we can gain access to the insights that drive innovation in our products. My conversation with Nisha reaffirmed a core belief that thoughtful, inclusive user research isn鈥檛 just an add-on, it鈥檚 the foundation of better design.

At SAP, design is a form of play grounded in empathy, experimentation, and the voices of our users.

Arin Bhowmick is chief design officer of SAP.

At SAP, we are committed to creating inclusive products that all people love to use for work. This requires active collaboration and communication among user researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers throughout the entire design and development process. I want to share some of the ways we have transformed how our teams work to inspire others to do the same.

Here are four simple things that your teams can do today to improve the user experience for all and create a culture of inclusion.

Adopt an Inclusive Approach to How Teams Work Together from the Very Beginning

To ensure everyone on the team gains a holistic understanding of the needs and motivations of the people they are creating products for, we need to get everyone involved right from the start. This means enabling user researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers to work together throughout the end-to-end process. It also means that each member of the team will be involved in the research itself.

At SAP, we are committed to making part of our everyday practice. For this to happen, user researchers take a participatory approach to the research itself 鈥� and intentionally include people from different cultural backgrounds, regions of the world, with a range of disabilities, working environments, and more. This has proven to be a game changer for our teams and has led to some surprising and impactful insights. Involving the core team in the research process also makes it possible for engineers to quickly build and test prototypes to ensure they function as intended, and for product managers to prioritize and integrate features into the final product.

Be Intentional about How the Work Happens

Active collaboration can only happen with the proper infrastructure in place to ensure designers, researchers, engineering, product management, and other key roles are continuously sharing work, getting feedback, and troubleshooting issues together as part of the day-to-day process. Collaboration rituals must be intentionally designed and inclusive of all roles on the team. By actively collaborating and communicating throughout the process, the team can proactively identify and address potential barriers to accessibility and usability.

Daily standups, frequent work sessions, and weekly retros are examples of the kind of rituals that make it easy for designers and engineers to work through issues they find together; for user researchers to continuously evaluate the designs and prototypes as the team comes up with different iterations of the experience they are developing; and so that product managers can make data-driven decisions throughout the end-to-end process.

Promote Diversity within the Team

This is often overlooked but plays a critical role in creating inclusive outcomes. It鈥檚 about being intentional about the diversity within the team itself. Diverse perspectives lead to better products. A team with diverse backgrounds and experiences brings a range of perspectives and insights to the design and development process.

When choosing who to assign to a project, focusing on diversity will allow the team to benefit from the unique perspectives within the group and contribute to the creation of products that are more inclusive and usable for a wider range of users. It’s at the intersection of our differences that we can truly foster and envision breakthrough ideas.

Start Developing a Problem-Seeking Mindset

In order to find solutions, you must first understand the problem. Creating products for a diverse global population requires us to proactively identify gaps in the current experience. Identifying the issues early on is something that needs to be celebrated and seen as an opportunity to improve the experience before it launches to customers.

The team must be open to challenging their own assumptions and biases and seek to understand how to make accessible and usable experiences for everyone. We have to continuously remind ourselves that we are not our users and hence need to have complete and unwavering focus on not only understanding the users but aligning as a team on the problem we are trying to solve.

51风流Design has made it a goal to come together as one intentionally diverse team with a shared purpose for creating inclusive experiences that improve people鈥檚 lives every day. By working together to understand and meet the needs of diverse users, team members can develop a shared understanding of the importance of inclusivity and a commitment to building products that are accessible and usable for all.

Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprises on .

Arin Bhowmick is chief design officer at SAP.

Companies across industries are颅 increasingly turning to design to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and usability of their products and services. But what is driving this shift toward design-led innovation? And what do we really mean when we say 鈥渄esign鈥�?

Design is an expression of intent to solve a problem and generate a positive outcome. It is part of the DNA of the systems, processes, and products that drive innovation and experiences. It鈥檚 not just about what happens on screens, or just how something looks or functions, but rather the forces, framework, disciplines, and execution that drive experience excellence at each touch point of the customer and user journey.

Design maturity is exemplified by an organization鈥檚 willingness to adopt design and user outcomes as a mindset. At SAP, we are evolving to ensure design influences how we operate, build, and go to market. As we scale our ambitious transformation journey, design gives us a way to reframe and rethink the problems we face amid significant global socioeconomic and environmental paradigm shifts, and to shape SAP鈥檚 path forward.

I am excited to share the journey we鈥檙e on to make design an integral part of SAP鈥檚 transformation, contributing to the success of businesses around the world.

Creating Meaningful Experiences for Users

Our goal is to build inclusive products that people love and enjoy using across multiple channels, web and mobile, so that they can get their job done and achieve their business outcomes wherever and whenever. And given that 51风流customers generate , we have a responsibility to create the most meaningful, efficient, accessible, and inclusive experiences within those products as possible. Our imperative to create better work experiences for all users is underlined by our desire to remain a human-centered company, which is why we are heavily relying on so that we understand who we are designing for — now and in the future.

We are strengthening and scaling our design and user research practices to include continuous, pragmatic, and strategic research to inform each phase of our product development and delivery. Our aim is to define and influence product strategies that are based on market and competitive insights, user needs, industry and tech trends, market segments, and intensive collaboration with customers and partners.

As our design practices continue to evolve, we will continuously uplift the end-to-end product experiences, injecting moments of delight and micro-interactions, as well as data and interactions and visualizations driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that elevate user engagement and satisfaction. Our evolving design system and language will bring together our product portfolio, our customer ecosystems, and our brand expression across digital, web, and physical touch points, so that we can create meaningful experiences that fuel the future of work.

Maturing the Design Strategy for Better Business Outcomes

Over the past year we have聽begun to reflect the needs of our users today and in the future. As our design system continues to evolve and mature, we are simultaneously undergoing a cultural and intellectual shift in terms of how we build our products. To drive better business outcomes for our customers, we are doubling down on data-driven decision-making, gathering real-time user feedback to strengthen our human-centered and design-led development process. At the same time, we are making design into a true SAP-wide team sport, extending our partnerships across all lines of business to make sure that design has an equal seat at the table for every strategic and product-based decision.

We are working to scale the impact of design, expanding the reach, type, and coverage of design-led innovations, and the maturity of our design practices across our global design community through an ambitious transformation of our strategic design acceleration services. We are building and extending our design practice to ensure we are looking ahead toward the next 50 years of work. Looking ahead, we are building and extending our design practice to include innovation and exploration of emerging technologies rooted in human behavior. Finally, we will strive for deeper user engagement and adoption along with easier and faster system deployments for all our customers in order to put a great user experience at the fingertips of every user.

Customer Co-Innovation with an Engaged Design Community

They say an organization is as good as its people, and we are ramping up our focus and collaboration practices to support being able to leverage the full power of our incredible and talented design community in unprecedented ways by investing in the success of our workforce. But design is not just for designers. To succeed, it requires collaboration with multiple partners and stakeholders across teams and lines of business. This is why we are bringing cross competency teams — design, engineering, product management, sales, marketing, support, etc. — closer together than ever before so that we are prepared to deliver the best products and experiences to our customers and end users.

This cultural shift in how we leverage our talented design community will allow us to co-innovate with our customers and partners in more impactful ways in order to support further business transformation and breakthroughs together.

To learn more about design at SAP, .

Arin Bhowmick is chief design officer at SAP.