User ExperienceFE

ATU

RE S

TORY

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The consumerization of IT has changed the way

people view technology in the office. Not only

do people want to bring their own devices and

attach them to the corporate network, they want

business software to work as easily as what they

use at home works.

Consumer-focused companies such as Amazon

and Facebook, and the hundreds of thousands of

mobile apps available, have defined the standard

for usability. They don’t come with instructions

— you look at them and know what to do. This is

now what people expect from all software. Unfor-

tunately, most companies have not been able to

meet this expectation.

In many industries, products follow a predict-

able evolution path. Customers first look for basic

functionality; whichever vendor has the most fea-

tures wins. When all suppliers meet this require-

ment, the next battleground is reliability, and

then price.

Enterprise software, which is a relatively

mature market, has already gone through these

phases. Now, the race is on to see who can deliver

the most desirable usability.

The Cost of Poor UsabilityPoor usability causes a variety of problems for

organizations, including:

■ Low productivity. If you can reduce the num-

ber of steps a person needs to go through to

complete a transaction or business process, you

will make them more productive.

Drive Productivity Through Personalization with SAP Screen Personas Individualized, Role-Based Screens Allow People to Get More Done in Less Time

by Peter Spielvogel, SAP

■ Poor adoption of enterprise software. If

software is hard to use, people will find other

ways to do their jobs that bypass the systems

of record.

■ High training costs. If software is intuitive,

you do not need any training. Consider that

most mobile applications do not come with

user manuals.

■ Uncertain data quality. If people are confused

about what data to enter in which field, it is

more likely that they will make mistakes in

their day-to-day online activities.

■ Excessive employee frustration. Fighting

with software on a daily basis can certainly

lead to increased job dissatisfaction.

While there have always been ways to improve

software usability, they generally required highly

skilled and expensive experts in computer pro-

gramming, database management, or back-end

system integration.

But the challenge that many organizations

face is that in the realm of enterprise software,

there is no one-size-fits-all solution; each business

has unique needs based on its industry, products,

and processes.

Companies should now take part in a user

experience renovation process that focuses on

the fact that different roles use information in

different ways. A salesperson and a shipping clerk

may both need to access the data related to a

sale, but they each want to see different fields to

perform their job functions.

Peter Spielvogel (peter. spielvogel@sap.com) is Senior Director of Product Marketing for SAP Imagineer-ing, the team that created SAP Screen Personas. He works with SAP customers to explore disruptive technologies across cloud computing, mobility, big data, and user experience. Peter has more than 20 years of experience in marketing, product management, sales, and software development.

This article appeared in the Apr n May n Jun 2014 issue of SAPinsider (www.SAPinsiderOnline.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.

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The first step in a user experience renovation

process, as with any IT project, is to identify

people’s needs. Using a design thinking approach

works best for this, as it allows people to fol-

low a structured method to balance desirability,

feasibility, and viability to reach an innovative

solution (see Figure 1). Steve Jobs captured the

essence of this in his address at Apple’s World-

wide Developers Conference in 1997: “You’ve got

to start with the customer experience and work

backwards to the technology.”1

Once you have a goal, it’s time to take the next

step in the user experience renovation process.

Personalized, Easy-to-Use ScreensSAP has recently introduced a fast and easy way

to modify screens that is accessible to both IT

managers and line-of-business users. SAP Screen

Personas allows you to quickly and easily simplify

SAP GUI screens to align the transaction with

specific user roles. Every person in an organiza-

tion can see the specific information they need

to perform their role effectively and efficiently.

SAP Screen Personas lets you personalize the

screen for each user so he or she can be more

focused and avoid visual distraction. Because it is

so easy to use, it reduces the time and cost of per-

sonalizing SAP screens and cuts the ramp-up time

that new users require to come up to speed on

SAP software.

SAP Screen Personas provides access to SAP

systems through a browser, eliminating the

requirement to install SAP GUI on every desktop

system. While this capability has been available

1 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE.

through the web GUI, what makes SAP Screen

Personas unique is that it allows editing of indi-

vidual screens (subject to proper security and

authorization rules) to simplify them.

The solution also gives you granular control

over every item on the screen. You can hide fields

you don’t use, move elements around to fit your

workflow, change colors, and add your own graph-

ics. You can simplify complex screens through pre-

filled fields and pull-down menus, saving time on

data entry. You can merge tabs together to stream-

line workflows and automate keystrokes using a

powerful macro engine. Best of all, most controls

are drag and drop. Even scripting is as simple as

recording your keystrokes and attaching them to

a button.

Scripting allows you to streamline transac-

tions and execute dozens of actions with a sin-

gle click. You can even bring information from

several transactions onto a single screen.

Customers can increase employee productivity

FIGURE 1 A design thinking

approach helps bring experts

together to focus on improving

the user experience

SAP Screen Personas lets you

personalize the screen for

each user so he or she can be

more focused and avoid visual

distraction. It reduces the time

and cost of personalizing SAP

screens and cuts the ramp-up

time that new users require.

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by creating dedicated screens for each role that

contain the specific information they need for

their transaction — nothing extra and nothing

missing (see Figure 2).

Because SAP Screen Personas is built into the

foundation of SAP software, it installs quickly,

leverages existing security settings, and follows

the standard transport process to bring new

screens into the production environment.

The Many Benefits of Simpler Screens SAP Screen Personas allows customers to make

their screens more intuitive, improving the user

experience. With a simplified user experience,

companies have been able to:

■ Boost call center productivity by 233%.

A manufacturing company used SAP Screen

Personas to simplify screens for its call center

staff. Now, operators enter all information on

a single screen (transaction IW51 in SAP ERP),

rather than multiple screens and tabs. This

allowed them to reduce the time it takes to

create a notification; each person now handles

20 calls per hour, up from six. In addition to

the productivity improvement, the company

also saves money on training.

■ Simplify the sales quotation process from

eight screens to two. The sales reps for a

medical technology company use transactions

VA21, VA22, and VA23 in SAP ERP to generate

quotes for their highly configurable systems

that include hardware, software, and regional

preferences. Before SAP Screen Personas,

they were frustrated by the number of clicks

required to get this done. Now, using a stream-

lined process that they built using SAP Screen

Personas, they were able to reduce the number

of screens from eight to two.

■ Increase user efficiency by up to 500%. An

entertainment technology company wanted to

provide quick and intuitive access to the most

commonly used transactions, simplify the user

interface, and eliminate non-value-added data

entry. The company used SAP Screen Personas

to reduce the steps required for one of its most

common transactions from approximately 30

to only five.

Learn MoreCustomers now have the power to simplify

SAP screens to drive productivity through

personalization. SAP Screen Personas provides

a fast, easy, and cost-effective way to deliver

the right information to the right person at the

right time.

For more information about SAP Screen

Personas, visit www.sapscreenpersonas.com.

Or, join the conversation at http://scn.sap.com/

community/gui. n

FIGURE 2 u SAP Screen Personas

allows customers to increase

productivity by easily modifying

screens based on roles and

responsibilities; this example

replaces SAP GUI for a

technology company that

uses it across several locations

SAP Screen Personas

has improved

customers’ user

experience, allowing

them to boost call

center productivity,

reduce the number

of screens used in

the sales quotation

process, and increase

user efficiency.