Intro

SAP software runs on all continents, serving people across different regions and cultures. It is simple courtesy to be respectful of a person’s culture, and this has a direct impact on the acceptance and usability of our software.

SAP is developing and consolidating its knowledge of cultural aspects and local business processes, and how they impact the requirements for our business software. Our aim is to build up a body of knowledge comprising cultural and intercultural information, examples, best practices and recommendations to guide the SAP Fiori design language.

SAP’s goal is to provide intuitive standard business software that can be used around the globe. Nevertheless, it can still be necessary to provide adaptations to support culture-specific needs or business processes.

What You’ll Find

This section is meant as a “living document” that will grow over time. If offers insights on:

• How we understand what culture and intercultural UX is
• Cultural and intercultural aspects relevant for UX and software functions
• Examples of specific cultural and intercultural aspects from different regions across the world (from within and outside SAP)

Are there guidelines I need to follow?

For the time being, our main goal is to make designers, enterprise product owners, software developers, and others aware of the implications of cultural and regional differences. Wherever we have concrete examples from SAP teams, we’ve included them. Otherwise, the cultural and intercultural aspects described here are intended as hints to highlight potential issues.

Over time, we plan to add further cultural and intercultural aspects, as well as information on different regions.

We Need Your Examples and Use Cases!

Do you have any findings on functional requirements that stem from cultural aspects or specific local business processes in your projects?

Please share you examples with us to help us evolve this information platform. The more insights we can get into cultural and intercultural requirements of our customers worldwide, the better we can serve them with suitable UX patterns!

With your feedback, you can help us to shape and refine our approach to intercultural UX going forward.

Contact: Ulla Geisel