Once you have a sufficient understanding of your users’ needs, by successfully completing the Discover phase, you can start designing the user experience of your application.
User experience goes beyond the user interface, and covers all aspects of the interactions a user has with the application: getting the right information shown at the right time, allowing the user to get their work done with only a few clicks needed, providing a fast and accessible solution, supporting all the international languages your users use in their systems.
A product with good usability gives users a good user experience.
Usability is defined by the degree to which these aspects are provided to a user to get their tasks or jobs done:
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Effectiveness
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Efficiency
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Ease of learning (Intuitiveness)
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Error tolerance
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Satisfaction
Consistency contributes to ease of learning and efficiency.
When providing users with applications to complement or extend your SAP landscape, you will need to ensure that your applications have a similar look and feel to SAP’s standard applications, and hence provide a consistent user experience for your users. This helps to make the applications intuitive to use (ease of learning) and helps with efficiency, since they look and behave the same as other applications users are already familiar with. For this reason, we recommend that you follow the SAP Fiori for Web Design Guidelines. In particular, follow the Best Practices for Designing SAP Fiori Apps.
In addition to consistency, ensure that your application is accessible, by following the guidance provided by Accessibility in SAP Fiori. Also, be sure to provide language support for all relevant languages as well as providing suitable user assistance.
When designing your application, make sure that you continue with your user research, so that you can get quick feedback about design ideas and artifacts. Iterate often, with the motto “Fail fast, fail early” – in other words, sketch out solutions, get feedback, try again, and keep on iterating until you are confident that your design is what your users need.
For more information about user research during the design phase, have a look at the User Research Method Cards related to the Design phase. The methods outlined there contain the most commonly practiced user research methods at SAP.