Good user experience (UX) goes beyond aesthetics and can have substantial business benefits, both financially and in overall efficiency. A great UX can improve productivity, enhance data quality, reduce training costs, and decrease the number of change requests.
A positive UX boosts user satisfaction, customer loyalty, and overall application adoption. Users are more likely to embrace an application that is intuitive and easy to use.
However, achieving a good UX involves overcoming several common challenges. Users often struggle with finding information, dealing with scattered data, excessive clicks, poor data entry interfaces, and unhelpful error messages. Beyond design, bad performance and unhelpful data visualization can also frustrate users.
The essential approach to designing a good application is design thinking, which emphasizes understanding users' needs through observation and feedback. Iteration is key: quickly sketch prototypes, gather user feedback, and refine your designs before moving to development. This ensures that the final product truly meets users' needs and optimizes resources effectively.
For organizations working with multiple applications, consistency is crucial. Users expect uniform visual design and interactions, easy access and navigation between applications, and common functions readily available. To achieve this, a design system is necessary. It ensures consistent user experience across various channels such as desktop, mobile, and so on.
In large-scale development, you also need robust frameworks, libraries, and user experience integration runtimes to manage hundreds of applications efficiently. Proper authorization tools are essential to control access for an extensive user base.
The SAP Fiori design system along with its enabling UI tools and technologies gives you the above: a comprehensive design system for web and mobile, along with a suite of development tools and UI frameworks, enabling SAP to provide a consistent UX with good usability across all SAP products, and enabling you to do the same for your applications. Using SAP's design system enables you to bring together business value, modern technology and excellent UX, thus benefitting business and users alike.
Find out more about user experience design and technology design in the next sections: