UX Role Guidance

Intro

This article outlines best practices for mapping a business role to SAP Fiori, including:

• Avoiding typical mistakes
• Setting goals for redesigning existing applications
• Breaking down tasks based on the level of detail and complexity (“pyramid approach”)
• Designing for different task types (recommended SAP Fiori floorplans and features)

Break Bad Habits

When you redesign a solution for SAP Fiori, avoid the following typical mistakes:

Mistake 1: “Repainting” the existing application

Do not try to translate the legacy UIs 1:1 into SAP Fiori screens. Although this may appear to be a routine procedure, the resulting design has no additional UX benefits and conflicts with the SAP Fiori design principles.

Mistake 2: Total decomposition

Avoid fragmenting the user experience into too many atomic applications. This approach results in an unclear information architecture and frustrating navigation for the user.

Set Appropriate Goals

The issues described above can be caused by suboptimal goal setting for a redesign project.

Use the Pyramid Approach

The pyramid approach maps the business role and their respective tasks to a certain level of the pyramid, based on the nature of a task. A business role and a pyramid have a 1:1 relationship. The pyramid can be seen as an abstraction for each role.

Break Down User Tasks by Level

On Level 1, the user starts with a single point of entry, which can be a corporate portal, an SAP Business Client, or just an icon on his desktop. For SAP Fiori, the recommended point of entry is the SAP Fiori launchpad home page. On the home page, the user normally gets a glimpse of the context from the available tiles, but it mainly serves as an entry point to the SAP world.

On Level 2, the user can get an overview of a special task or domain, with more contextual information than on the launchpad home page. If a user has several roles assigned, it might be the case that each role comes, for example, with an overview page that the user can access to get an overview of that domain. But also a list report could provide a good overview on a specific area, such as purchase orders, for example.

On Level 3, the user is already deep into his or her task and needs more details and information to complete the task. Here we typically talk about object pages, create and edit scenarios, and other “standard” activities.

Level 4 provides access to special apps for highly specialized experts. We call them expert tasks. These tasks are so complex that they would not fit into Level 1-3, but are still relevant enough for the user to offer them in SAP Fiori.

Level 5 provides access to all tasks and functions that are not SAP Fiori-enabled and that are considered lower priority, meaning that the user does not need to spend much time on this level.

Define the Task Type

Once you’ve researched your user personas and their activities to determine the business role, we recommend clustering the resulting use cases into several task types. Each task type contains a set of practical tips to map it to the SAP Fiori Design Guidelines.

We differentiate between five basic task types which have their own practical tips for a successful mapping into SAP Fiori.

Routine Task

Definition: Routine tasks are process-driven activities or exceptions that happen on a regular basis and that are quick to handle.
Keywords/Examples: Exception Handling, Process-Based, Routine, Workflow, Quick Action, No-Brainer, Recurring

Use Cases Examples

• As a Transportation Planner, I want to review Full Truck Load (FTL) proposals in order to approve them if possible.
• As a Contract Manager, I want to identify expired contracts in order to renew them if needed.

Practical Tips

• Use the worklist floorplan with quick actions for low volume tasks (up to 40 items).
• Use list report floorplan with variants and filters for higher volumes.
• Use variant management with Create as Tile functionality to bring user-specific variants to the launchpad home page for monitoring.
• Use the object page as a backup to provide more context if required.
• Enable the enterprise search for your objects and task lists.
• Bring actions to the enterprise search result list if there is sufficient context for the user to make a decision.
• Bring actions to the overview page (stacked cards) if the context for making decision is sufficient.
• Use notifications to inform or remind the user about tasks.

Reactive (Firefighting) Task

Definition: Reactive incident resolutions based on external trigger(s).
Keywords/Examples: Incident Management, Firefighting, External Trigger, Reactive, Search as Navigation

Example Use Cases

• As a Transportation Planner, I want to change the carrier of an existing Freight Order in order to react on urgent carrier cancellation.
• As a Transportation Planner, I want to change an appointment of an existing Freight Order in order to react to an urgent customer service request.
• As a Remote Service Engineer, I want to confirm and block a service date in order to react to short term customer requests.

Practical Tips

• Use the object page as the main destination to solve this type of task.
• Enable the enterprise search for all your objects. Think about the search as the main navigation tool for this type of task.
• Use quick views with actions within the list report and object page floorplans, and block edit on the object page for spot adjustments.
• Use the list report floorplan enabled with local search, sorting, and filters to organize objects in lists.
• Use actions in the enterprise search result list if there is sufficient context for the user to make a decision.
• Use notifications as an alternative form of navigation and to bring more context to the task.

Monitoring Task

Definition: KPI-driven monitoring of the specific domain with a purpose in mind as well as information absorption activities with open result.
Keywords / Examples: Measure-driven, KPI-driven, List Reports, Monitoring Variants, Embedded Analytics, Dashboards

Example Use Cases

• As a Transportation Planner, I want to see an overview of activities in my domain in order to understand the operations and receive feedback regarding my planning activities.
• As a Transportation Manager, I want to have an overview across my areas of responsibility in order to detect where I have to intervene because of negative KPI values.
• As an MRP Controller, I want to monitor a specific material group in order to avoid shortages within a particular time horizon.
• As an Accounts Payable Accountant, I want to monitor supplier line items, and if needed, block payments for a specific item.

Practical Tips

• Define KPIs and measures for your role. You can use them across analytical and operative SAP Fiori floorplans (including Smart Business, overview pages, list reports, object pages, and so on), as well as on the launchpad.
• Use the list report floorplan and Smart Business apps with variants and filters to create specific monitoring lists. Later, these lists can serve as a basis for your overview page content (list and stacked cards).
• Use variant management together with the Create as Tile functionality to bring user-specific variants to the SAP Fiori launchpad for monitoring.
• Use the launchpad to monitor tasks across different business roles.
• Use the overview page to monitor tasks inside a specific business role.
• Connect to analytical tasks by providing navigation to analytical tools depending on the role’s requirements and skills (for example, Smart Business Framework, Analysis Path Framework, analytical list page, and so on).

Analytical Tasks

Definition: Root cause analysis as well as data mining with open results.
Keywords/Examples: Design Time, Analysis Path Framework, BW Report , (ZEN) Design Studio, Lumira, Predictive, Drilldowns, Cloud For Analytics

Example Use Cases

• As a Transportation Manager, I want to drill down into arrival performance statistics in order to find out which of my carriers on which routes are frequently not delivering on time.

Practical Tips

• Define characteristics and key figures for your role. You can use them for for the creation of analytical reports and KPIs for the overview page or the launchpad.
• Select an appropriate analytical tool depending on the requirements and skills of the role (for example, Smart Business Framework, Analysis Path Framework, analytical list page, and so on)
• Use the list report floorplan or the analytical list page with variants, sorting, and filtering if you do not need a drilldown.
• Use the Smart Business Framework with evaluations, filters, and a good set of predefined views for simple drilldown analyses.
• Use the Analysis Path Framework with predefined paths, filters, and views for more complex drilldown analyses.

Expert Tasks

Definition: Planning activities, complex exception handling, and design and system configuration activities.
Keywords / Examples: Workbench, Planning, What-If, Simulation, Comparison, Testing, Configurations, Orchestration

Practical Tips

The experts tasks, by their nature, require very complex interactions with the system which may differ very much from use case to use case.
Just think about the following sample use stories, which are always a good candidates for an expert level:

• As a Transportation Planner, I want to assign demands to shipments in order to create a transportation plan.
• As an MRP Planner, I want to simulate different solution proposals in order to find an optimal solution for material shortage.
• As a Master Data Specialist, I want to create and enrich a new master data object (material, business partner, cost center, and so on)
• As an Internal Sales Representative, I want to navigate into a sales order to add a sales order item.

Each of these tasks may require different interaction concepts, such as preview or simulation (Transportation Planner and MRP Planner), digital assistance (MRP Planner, Master Data Specialist), or draft handling (Internal Sales Representative and Master Data Specialist). Due to this fact, it is quite difficult to come up with a fixed set of a practical tips which may fit to all tasks of this category.

In general, designing an expert task is a project in itself. It requires careful research of the user’s needs and the underlying business processes. We highly recommend involving the SAP Design team early on to work in collaboration with application design. The resulting design solution may include several interaction concepts and is very individual for each business domain.

You may find some useful examples with screenshots for this and other task types in our UX Role Guidance presentation (PDF Slides).

Summary

In order to properly translate your role into the SAP Fiori Design language, you have to keep in mind following important points:

• Research: Understand your end user. Carry out a solid research to figure out the tasks of your user.
• Task Types: Categorize your research results based on provided tasks types and their importance.
• Examples and Practical Tips: Use practical tips and examples during the Ideation phase to map your use cases into SAP Fiori Design Guidelines and create an information architecture for your project.
• Big Picture: Plan your portfolio and break it down into SAP Fiori applications based on the “big picture” created in the previous steps.

Resources

Want to dive deeper? Follow the links below to find out more about related controls, the SAPUI5 implementation, and the visual design.