SAP for Me

FEATURE DESIGN | SEPT. 2021 - MAY. 2022

SAP for Me

SAP for Me is a digital portal that aggregates key alerts, metrics, and insights about a user’s SAP product portfolio. The system acts as a single-entry point, providing comprehensive transparency and easy access to important tools. During my time as a lead designer on SAP for Me, it was discovered that the experience for viewing and managing customer-level details required a thorough redesign to improve user performance.

Context

A feature design created for SAP partners

Contribution

Design Lead

Collaborators

Jen Guano
Ken Lee
Dirk Falconer

01

STRATEGY

The Approach

The Problem

SAP collaborates with thousands of companies to be part of their Partner ecosystem. These SAP partners build, extend, and customize SAP software to deliver tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of clients. As such, SAP partners can have extensive lists of customers in which they need to manage using the SAP for Me platform. However, the customer-level details are spread across a complex information architecture with unclear navigational elements.

Research Process

To identify the core concerns that partners have when navigating through customer-level details, I performed a series of sentiment surveys and remote user interviews with 5 Partner Managers. Feedback from the surveys and interviews were consolidated and analyzed to better understand key pain points and goals for the Partner experience.

From the user research conducted the following key goals were identified.


Simplify the Dashboard Organization

When browsing the system, participants often found themselves on pages with very little information (a single line of text or data). Separating this information was described as unnecessary and difficult to find.

Improve Clarity of Wayfinding Elements

Wayfinding elements such as breadcrumbs, and local sub-navigation were unclear and did not accurately describe the webpages. As such, participants found it difficult to identify where they were in the information architecture.

Improve Consistency and Information Scent of Dashboard Elements

Some users found it difficult to discern what information would be provided when interacting with certain links. As well, naming conventions and labelling methods were inconsistent across the dashboard.

02

CONSIDERATIONS

Constraints

SAP for Me caters to both SAP partners as well as external customers. As such, the system accommodates for two distinct dashboard views – Partner and Customer dashboards.


Aligning the parallel experiences to be consistent across both these environments was essential and required constant communication with the Customer design team. While redesigning the dashboard layout, ensuring that the changes made would align with the Customer teams’ vision and distinct user needs was essential. However, this was a great opportunity to learn cross-team production and deployment methods.

03

DESIGN / INTERACTION

Digital Prototype

Simplified Information Architecture

Functional cards were also categorized and grouped based on sampled user processes, ensuring a more cohesive workflow. Card designs were also enhanced to accommodate additional details, removing the need to for pages with single lines of data.

Wayfinding Elements

Breadcrumbs in the heading of dashboards were corrected to more accurately define the user’s current position in the flow. As well, when viewing a selected customer profile, key information is displayed in sub-headers. By implementing these features, SAP for Me is providing contextual cues and reassuring the users of their orientation in web environment.

Support Accessibility

Initially, SAP partners had no clear method for accessing support and would be required to contact an SAP representative through email. To reduce the amount of email inquiries, a new ‘Get Assistance’ button was implemented that would direct users to a web portal that offered support resources. The resources included frequently asked questions, in-depth explanations of card functionalities and resources for accessing the correct support representative.

Integrating Illustrations

To make the SAP for Me dashboards more engaging and visually compelling, stylized illustrations were integrated into the dashboards for key system responses and interactions. The significance of each illustration largely varied – while some were used to help identify dialogs for user feedback, others signified unauthorized user functionality.

S4M illustrations

04

REFLECTION

Takeaways

After implementing the redesign, many of the Partner Managers appreciated and supported the changes made. Some testimonials consist of:

SAP for Me now looks a lot simpler to use – I can manage my customers much easier this way.

- Partner Manager


This is much easier to navigate than before. I used to struggle finding the right tool at times.

- Partner Manager

As the dashboards in SAP for Me grow and more functional cards are added, the team intends to continue monitoring the web environment and ensure the design meets future concerns.