Why has SAP introduced this new User eXperience in UI which is so much different from the traditional way of working?

The answer is simple: from past few years, people are using iPhones, tablets, doing more eShopping, using Twitter, Facebook and other social media applications to collaborate and share and this has raised consumer expectation of what interaction should be like and provided SAP to get a good opportunity to transform its 20 year-old UI design into a new look.

SAP New UX 5 Key Principles

If you take a deep look into this new User eXperience, there are 5 Key Principles that should be followed:

Keeping it simple – the application should be created for one user type with one use case and covered within three different navigations screens.

Role-Based – so that the same application can be used by many individual users at a different level, at the same time.

The application should provide Instant Value – which means the users can directly see the advantage, so they can go for the adoption.

There should be coherency for all the application, no matter the function domain.

The applicaiton should run in all devices, should be Responsive.

Application Categories

To bring this to the customer landscape within an existing business process, SAP has characterized applications in 3 different ways or categories:

New Applications – These applications are very innovative, totally new and many of them are native. New functionality and new skin.

Renew Applications – These applications are also out of the box and mainly for a wider audience, for example, the existing VA03 Sales Order transaction. The same funcionality but with a different skin.

Enablement Toolkits – There are many business processes which are specific to the customers for their own specific businesses. For these specific scenarios, there are technologies and frameworks like Floor Plan Manager, Script Persona or our Javascript library from SAP, called SAPUI5, that will help doing the mapping and fill the business gaps.

UI5CN

Welcome to UI5 community network !

How it all started

It all started four months back when my friend call me regarding some new development which he was doing with SAP UI5. He told me that he had learned UI5 and HANA from open SAP and he was now building a small application.

He got the code available in the internet but was having some confusion regarding a few components, as he was getting an error message. We checked the code for a while and found there was a data binding which was missing and once we fixed that, and some other small issues, we were able to make the app work. He was very excited as his first app was working 🙂

After 2 weeks, he pinged me because he got into a project and was going for customer workshop for requirement gathering and was bit worried, as working with this new technology from SAP is not that simple and he was also not having real time project experience.

We spent 1 hour in a call where we discussed about the UX, information architecture, personas, wireframing and prototyping tools from SAP.

He seems to be quite relaxed now as he has now been told what will happen and what he has to do. Again after 3 weeks, I got a call that the user workshop was done and the customer liked the new design and the way workshop was conducted, focusing on business rather than technology. He requested a short video on the topic, which we discussed on the call for his friends.

The Video Course

After a while guess my luck !!!

People got more interested on my videos and they wanted me to record more.

One thing lead to another and we formed a small group of people called UI5 Community which shares learning material and real project experiences.

Now, after lots of request from people outside of my organization, we decided to compile all content and present it in three series, so many people can benefit from it.

We also got a domain called UI5CN.com with our own udemy , facebook , LinkedIn , youtube and twitter (@ui5cn_ajay) group.

After all we are a new generation of techies 😉

We have shared our first series, which focuses on Getting Started in SAP UX Development and the best part about it is that it is free 😀

In the series 2 and 3, we are going to make it totally development oriented and share all development related code snippets for UI5 development.

Thank you for checking out and letting us know how you liked the idea !