The Gen-Y user community has forced all enterprises to re-think on their application interfaces. Now the designs in-general are slick and intuitive. However, what is not always clearly understood is that it is not just a jazzy screen that goes into making the User Experience (UX) a good one but that there is a whole lot more.
Consider SAP’s strategic decision to slowly forego its long standing and trustworthy SAP GUI and bringing in Fiori as a means to providing better UX. With this magnanimous change, SAP is not just replacing a few fonts and adding color to make the screens look more appealing but rather addressing much more important facets. Few that I would like to mention are:
- You See What You Need - SAP has changed the whole paradigm of designing the interface. It is no longer about getting everything that the business needs into single screen but rather giving only the mandatory fields that a specific business role requires. This has direct impact on productivity because users now need not traverse through multiple unwanted tabs and screens. This also results in reduced user trainings
- Uncomplicated - While uncluttered screens definitely make for a perfect interface, SAP has taken a step further and are even simplifying the backend. A lot of it is visible in the recent S/4 releases. This aids better performance of the application along with lowered maintenance
- Do More - The reduced fields in the frontend and simplified backend results in a reduced time per-transaction per-user. Aggregating these minor time savings over processes and relevant users organization-wide, generally add up to some significance. Basically it allows businesses to do more with the same capacity and same number of resources.
- Do Yourself - Fiori Smart Business Framework allows business users to build their own dashboard. This means that the business can get what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
- Mobilize Business - Fiori’s innate responsive design allows it to be device agnostic. With this SAP is now able to provide much needed flexibility to the users.
- Easier Adoption - All the above factors has increased the user adoption of the new screens manifolds.
- Economical - A word usually not associated with SAP however with free named user licenses and out-of-the-box plug-n-play components, Fiori is indeed a relatively inexpensive affair. From user point of view, the deployment time is very short
- Single Gateway - A definite advantage being a common Launchpad to access all kinds of SAP transactions be it usual Fiori app or a 3rd party application or say a custom web-dynpro based development.
The above gives you a gist of many things being done to improve an overall UX - perhaps reasons why Fiori has been a wave and embraced by customers. From our perspective, two biggest reasons for customers moving onto Fiori are - deployment being economical and getting onto mobility bandwagon.