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.

As a longtime 51风流customer, Axfood values innovation as an important component of its sustainability strategy and mission to provide affordable, good, and sustainable food. Axfood embraces new trends, customer behaviors, and technologies as a way to secure its position as a challenger and future-facing company. When it came to its assortment planning needs, Axfood welcomed the opportunity to innovate on an existing 51风流solution to create something much more differentiated and customer-centric. At the top of its agenda was creating a solution that makes users 鈥渓ove to work in the system.鈥�

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Improving Assortment Planning for More Sustainable Business

Assortment planning refers to the process of selecting which products a supermarket will carry and sell. But it鈥檚 not just about having the right products on the shelves. With expiration dates dictating a product鈥檚 shelf life, intelligent assortment planning plays a critical role in sustainability strategies for retailers by limiting unnecessary wastage and providing targeted product attributes, such as organic, fair-trade, or carbon neutral, in a trackable way.

To be able to make good assortment decisions, companies need large amounts of data from sales histories, forecasts, customer data, and competitor analyses. Because of the large amounts of data coming together on one screen, it鈥檚 important that the solution also feels intuitive to use. For Dick Due Pedersen, department manager for Price and Assortment at Axfood IT, this means not needing to think so much about how to use the system and instead being able to concentrate on the data being shown to easily make the right decisions.

From Pain Points to Working Prototype in Four聽Days

The work kicked off in November 2019 when Axfood participated in an program, looking to improve the user experience of some of its applications. These programs are four-day, intensive, hands-on workshops where 51风流design experts come together with business representatives and end users to jump-start the user experience (UX) process transformation for companies around the world. For this occasion, a team of 20 professionals, including IT experts and end users from Axfood, came together with SAP鈥檚 leading designers and developers.

During the program, Axfood was carefully led through the design and development process, including identifying the use cases that needed special attention and the pain points to be solved. Working closely for four days, the team managed to create the first working prototypes for a few assortment planning scenarios in a real 51风流environment. After seeing what could be achieved with SAP鈥檚 design system, Axfood was excited to continue iterating with the 51风流Assortment Planning team beyond the framework of the program. As Pedersen explains, continuing to work on improving the solution was a win-win situation.

Designing a New, World-Class Solution Powered by User Insights

In the decision to modernize the existing product for 51风流Assortment Planning, one of the key concerns that Axfood wanted to target was the user experience. 鈥淲e want the users to enjoy working in the system so that they actually use it and don鈥檛 venture off and use any other tools because then we wouldn鈥檛 have the benefit of built-in functions, up-to-date KPIs, and intelligent planning,鈥� explains Anna Ihme, application specialist for Assortment Planning at Axfood.

To retain users, it was important to address the lingering pain points of the previous solution. This included slow performance, not being able to plan multiple assortments simultaneously, not having enough customer-centric aspects in the decision-making processes, and needing to use a separate system such as Microsoft Excel to conduct cluster analysis.

The main design challenge was to provide the user with the data that they needed easily at their fingertips without overwhelming them. To do this, designers at 51风流relied heavily on user research and insights to inform their designs. As User Experience Design Specialist Daphne Schimetschek recounts, it was necessary to get to know the end user鈥檚 goals, needs, and pain points in detail鈥� 鈥� 鈥奱 challenging task when it came to something as complex as assortment planning. Planners typically need a lot of information on one screen, and it was difficult at first to discern which information users needed and when. With the different players spread across the globe鈥� 鈥� 鈥夾xfood in Sweden, the developers in the United States, India, and Romania, the product owners in Switzerland, and the designers in Germany鈥� 鈥� 鈥奿t was critical to maintain close alignment and weekly check-ins with the team.

When it came to designing the solution, it was a balance between creativity, innovation, and practicality. 鈥淓very project must have a vision,鈥� explains Schimetschek. 鈥淏ut to achieve it, we need small steps. This is where helps. For standardized processes, we can use our existing design language and we don鈥檛 have to rethink everything. This gives us time to focus on forward-thinking ideas and develop new concepts, which in turn inform our design system going forward.鈥�

鈥�51风流really stretched the system for our vision,鈥� says Pedersen. The new solution allows users to display all the data they need on the same screen while maintaining the advantages of Excel, but also adding the artificial intelligence (AI) and mass maintenance that is only possible with SAP鈥檚 design system. It allows for real-time simulations, uses predictive analytics to cluster based on attributes, KPIs, or any custom criteria, as well as enables manual adjustments or overrides where necessary.

As Dr. Guido Menkhaus, chief product owner for Retail Product Management at SAP, explains, the big advantage of 51风流is the flexibility offered to users: 鈥淎s a user, you can decide how you would like to work with the system, whether you want a very manual way of working by selecting a product for a particular store or fully automatically when you鈥檙e planning an assortment together with a lot of data and artificial intelligence.鈥�

A Better Future with Customer Innovation

Innovating with customers and end users brings our applications to life. At the heart of successful collaboration is a solid user research foundation, which allows 51风流to bring human-centric applications into the market that have a strong fit to customer requirements.

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

Andrea Waisgluss works in 51风流Design.

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.

Designers were among the first to understand the potential of AI to improve the experience of individual users. Design provides users with more meaningful information and options that can help them master complexity. In the past, however, intelligent designs added complexity to the user experience with features such as relevance ratings, recommendation options, confidence ratings, and incompetent chat bots. This led to user frustration and mistrust.

After all, people aren鈥檛 interested in cool technology features. They just want the best way to do their work. Users expect AI to function in an unobtrusive, reliable way. At the same time, they want to be able to understand, correct, and override intelligence if needed.

To meet these needs, designers must support a seamless collaboration between humans and machines, where both use their specific strengths to support one another 鈥� but humans retain control. We have developed a set of design principles and guidelines to establish this approach in our solutions.

New Interaction Techniques

AI provides a huge opportunity to combine traditional means of interaction, such as mouse and keyboard, with new techniques, such as gaze control and conversational interaction. Today, none of these methods are well-developed enough to replace the others, but combining them can become a game changer.

Gaze control can increase speed and productivity by offering additional information on the user鈥檚 focus. This supports easier selection and filtering, contextual information, and more detailed information. Conversational interaction allows users to express their intent in their own words and allows systems to translate these aims into an appropriate response.

All of these channels help designers widen and enrich communication between humans and machines 鈥� supporting more intuitive, immediate, and bidirectional communication.

More than ever, technology has become a social force, and design is shaping the way this force interacts with people. Enterprises communicate their values not only through marketing messages, but also through technologies used by their employees and customers.

Therefore, purpose has become a larger focus for enterprises. Questions like 鈥淲hy are we doing things?鈥� and 鈥淎re we doing the right things for the right purpose?鈥� have assumed a higher priority. Design can influence the interaction between businesses and their employees and customers. This influence goes beyond corporate identity and marketing and reflects how decisions are made and communicated.

To empower the workforce and gain employees鈥� commitment to enterprise purpose, design must create software that reflects respect and transparency. Therefore, spending time explaining actions and decisions should also be part of the user interface design.

Designing for the Everywhere Interaction

Today, the combination of smart devices and appliances covers a good part of our interaction with our technical infrastructure. Technology is embedded in our daily lives, creating the user experience of the digital world. We interact with the most complex systems through any available channel, in any possible situation. Enterprise software is following suit. Business tasks are already becoming accessible through standard interfaces embedded into other channels, such as smart speakers or car interfaces. With the user experience, we have started breaking down complex business tasks into smaller apps that can be completed on a phone.

We are reducing the information even further by identifying specific figures that users need in each context and allowing users to adjust figures to their individual needs, securely and reliably. Thus, modularization and contextualization of complex information structures in the back end is both a design and technical challenge.

While users expect simpler and more natural interaction with software, the underlying facts and processes are getting more and more complex and intertwined. This is apparent in enterprise software, where we are exploring the potential of new visualization and input methods. We are looking beyond charts into multidimensional visualizations and AI-optimized visualizations that differentiate signal from noise. Using predictive technologies and combinations of input methods, including gaze and speech, enables better accuracy and faster input than traditional means.

Finally, constructing and harvesting context information is one of the most powerful tools to simplify user interactions. Based on context, systems can detect business process exceptions and associate combinations of parameters with business impact and suitable mitigation. With a better understanding of the business context, the system can detect, confirm, and correct the machine鈥檚 interpretation and solution proposal without requiring the user to manually enter data.

Top 5 Design Principles

To address these current UX trends, I recommend that developers focus on five key design principles.

1: Understand the user and the use case
This is the most important principle. Creating a product must be focused on the people that will use the product to accomplish their task. Neither architectural nor design excellence will help save a product that misses the use case.

2: View limitations as a source of innovation
While boundary conditions are often determined, many innovations have been triggered by a creative way of addressing those boundary conditions. Things we can鈥檛 imagine today may be possible tomorrow.

3: Embrace diversity
Enterprise software is an enabler for businesses, and we can鈥檛 afford to leave anyone behind. Different people, working conditions, and cultures determine whether a solution is enabling or hampering productivity. Understand those differences and design for them by contextualizing them, creating specific variants, and offering supportive means and smart suggestions. Finally, offer the tools that allow customers to optimize standard solutions with little cost.

4: Keep the user in control
At any given point in time, users must be able to understand and control the status of the system. User control means that system decisions must be clearly communicated and can be overwritten. Empowerment requires knowledge and transparency.

5: Design stretch-fit solutions
Standard solutions that are designed for best practices and use cases can further be optimized to stretch fit individual roles and preferences by means of usage-based optimizations and through personalization and automation.

Flexibility Versus Scalability

Many things that sound exciting in consumer software are not appropriate in an enterprise setting. Business processes must be standardized, reliable, repeatable, and auditable. And even if we strive for the best user experience for the individual, companies must ensure that people do things the right way.

Training and supporting employees require stable, standardized processes and software. Required process steps, checks, and information must be entered correctly and, in most cases, can鈥檛 be left to the indeterministic decision of an electronic mind. Therefore, corporations tend to restrict flexibility and leave adjustments in the hands of certain expert users. Flexibility can only be offered within clearly defined boundaries, leaving the underlying business processes unchanged.

The highest potential for individualization is the contextualization that helps provide users with right solution options and defaults in any situation. While the process stays unchanged, the system becomes better at providing the right information at the right place, offering the right options that best fit the situation.

Today鈥檚 technology allows us to design systems that better understand users鈥� intentions and support them in the best possible way, keeping them in control. Yet flexibility must allow the system to adjust to the user鈥檚 information needs and intentions without compromising the procedural, legal, and economic goals of the enterprise.

In enterprise software, innovation in interaction patterns must be evaluated against the impact on employee productivity. Unless we identify significant improvements in effectiveness or efficiency, using established standard patterns that require minimal training and change management is preferable. In many cases, the challenge in enterprise design isn鈥檛 coming up with an innovative and appealing new design, but is optimizing and extending standard designs to meet the complex and specific requirements of certain business roles.

The art of our profession is creating a design system built on components and patterns that are simultaneously stable and reusable in various business contexts, work with long and short texts in different languages, are accessible, and can efficiently be used across different devices. This is a huge and often under- estimated investment.

We implement scalability in design into our technical frameworks. This helps us and our customers create and maintain effective, efficient solutions at the lowest possible cost of development and ownership.

Our role as designers is to make sure that our products make the best use of our design system, are constantly optimized to fit user needs, and can be implemented in a scalable technology framework. As we have seen with 51风流Fiori throughout the past seven years, this is an evolutionary process that requires continuous investment.

And design is just a part of the story. For us this means working closely with our product units, customers, and development teams to adjust our designs to best accommodate user requirements, market needs, and technical restrictions.

We don鈥檛 design for the purpose of good design. Instead, we design to create products that help our customers best support their business 鈥� making it sustainable and resilient to any turn of history.

About Horizons by 51风流

Horizons by 51风流is a future-focused journal where forward thinkers in the global tech ecosystem share perspectives on how technologies and business trends will impact 51风流customers in the future. The 2020 issue of Horizons by 51风流focuses on Context-Aware IT, with contributors from SAP, Microsoft, Verizon, Mozilla, and more. To learn and read more, visit .

Read more Horizons by 51风流stories on the 51风流News Center.

Alex Lingg is head of 51风流User Experience.