AI and SAP are a powerful combination. When it comes to the ways that the SAP user experience can be enhanced with AI, keep five design guidelines in mind.
It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we work. While the traditional paradigm involved humans operating machines, today’s AI transforms the interaction between machines and humans into a dialogue between coworkers that have complementary skill sets.
When it comes to SAP, AI holds great potential to improve the SAP user experience (UX). Design gives users more meaningful information and options that assists them in mastering complexity. Yet, it’s important to note that past intelligent designs added complexity to the user experience through features like relevance ratings, confidence ratings, recommendation options, and unhelpful chat bots. Of course, users who interacted with these features became frustrated and began to approach AI with mistrust. After all, people just want to be able to do their work efficiently and expect AI to function in an unobtrusive, reliable way. Simultaneously, users need to be able to understand, correct, and override intelligence if necessary.
How should designers meet these needs? The simple answer is to support a smooth collaboration between humans and machines, in which both use their specific strengths to support each other – though humans maintain control. When it comes to transforming the everyday user experience into an award-winning user experience, following AI-focused design guidelines should be kept in mind…
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Top 5 Design Principles to Improve the SAP User Experience
In keeping with current UX trends, SAP recommends that UX designers focus on five key design principles.
1. Understand the user and the use case: to start, SAP notes that this item is the most important principle. When creating a product, the focus should be on the people who will use the product to accomplish their task. If the product misses the use case, neither architectural or design excellence will save it.
2. Use limitations to innovate: when boundary conditions arise, innovations can be triggered by a creative way of addressing these limitations.
3. Embrace diversity: enterprise software is an enabler for businesses and no company should be left behind. Different cultures, people, and working conditions determine whether a solution is enabling or hampering productivity. Accept these variations and design for them by creating specific variants, contextualizing them, and offering supportive means and intelligent suggestions. At the same time, offer the tools that allow customers to optimize standard solutions with little cost.
4. Give the user control: no matter the point in time, users must be able to understand and control the status of the system. For the user to have control, system decisions must be clearly communicated and should be able to be overwritten. Empower the user by providing both knowledge and transparency.
5. Design-led, stretch-fit solutions: Standard solutions that are designed for use cases and best practices can further be optimized to stretch fit individual role-based preferences through personalization and automation and by means of usage-based optimizations.
How does AI support the SAP Cloud Platform? Get insights into functionalities and more!
Trends in AI that Affect SAP UX
New Interaction Techniques
One of the greatest benefits provided by AI is its ability to combine traditional means of interaction, like a mouse and keyboard, with new techniques, including SAP conversational AI interaction and gaze control. When combined, these methods prove to be a game changer in that they help designers widen and enrich communication between machines and humans, leading to more intuitive, immediate, and bidirectional communication.
Conversational interaction lets users express their intent in their own words; systems then respond by translating these aims into an appropriate response. Gaze control can increase productivity and speed by offering additional information on the user’s focus. This supports contextual information, easier selection and filtering, and more detailed information.
To gain employees’ commitment to enterprise purpose and to empower the workforce, software must be created that reflects transparency and respect. Therefore, enterprises should spend time explaining decisions and actions – this approach should also be part of user interfaces.
Designing for the Everywhere Interaction
Our interaction with our technical infrastructure is covered by the combination of smart devices and appliances. This is also true for enterprises. Through standard interfaces embedded into other channels, like smart speakers or car interfaces, business tasks are already becoming accessible. For instance, with the SAP Fiori user experience, complex business tasks are broken down into smaller apps that can be completed on a phone. Further, SAP Fiori elements allows users to scale with consistent design, making it easier to create customized Fiori apps. With SAP Fiori design, users can build apps for their organization that are simple, preconfigured, and UI technology-independent. Additionally, SAP Screen Personas is a critical part of the SAP user experience strategy, ideal for streamlining and automating business processes, along with simplifying transactions to create the Fiori user experience on all devices being used.
As users expect more natural and simpler interactions with software, the underlying processes and facts are getting more and more complex. This trend is clear in enterprise software, where the potential of new input methods and visualization are being explored. Through predictive technologies and combinations of input methods like gaze and speech, better accuracy and faster input is enabled.
To simplify user interactions, enterprises can rely on tools that construct and harvest information. Using context, systems can detect business process exceptions and associate combinations of parameters with business impact and suitable migration. By having a better understanding of the business context, the system can detect, confirm, and correct the machine’s interpretation and solution proposal, freeing the user from manually entering data.
Flexibility versus Scalability
Designers are tasked with creating a design system built on patterns and components that are concurrently accessible, reusable and stable in various business contexts, can efficiently be used across different devices, and work with long and short texts in different languages. Therefore, technical frameworks should be built with scalability in the design. This approach helps businesses and their customers create and maintain efficient, effective solutions at the lowest possible cost of ownership and development. At the end of the day, the UX strategy should ensure that products make the best use of the design system, can be implemented in a scalable technology framework, and are constantly optimized to fit user needs.
How does Stefanini add AI to your SAP operations? Find out here!
SAP Solutions with Stefanini
At Stefanini, we are able to integrate across areas like customer experience, networking and management to make intelligent systems. We are using an out-of-the-box integration, which represents the set of readily usable integration components that can connect a suite of applications.
- Digital Transformation Roadmap Planning and Assessment Services
- Predictive Analytics Applications and Services
- Machine Learning and AI-Enterprise Digital Assistant
- Digital Core Applications – S4HANA
- Cloud Factory
- Digital Dive with Collaborative Agile Business Prototyping
- Architecture Services
- Stefanini Integration Suite
