Unifying a vast product landscape
ROLE
Design Lead
Problem
SAP offers a huge range of products that help customers run every aspect of their business, but provided no way to centrally manage them. I was tasked with defining and designing a new product that would provide IT admins and business analysts with a centralized overview of their SAP products.
Design Kickoff
Given the loosely defined nature of the product and the problems it was meant to address, I planned a project kickoff to bring the designers, developers, and product owners together to accomplish a few objectives:
Unify our understanding of the scope of MyHome with key stakeholders and product owners
Establish a clear working model between the design and product teams
Collaborate in the problem-solving process to develop a strong perspective on the challenges and potential solutions
Over the course of three days I utilized a variety of large and small group activities to develop, evaluate, and refine the use cases and user journeys that would define the product.
Once we’d identified the initial use cases, I facilitated co-creative sessions with cross-disciplinary teams to define content and sketch lo-fi wireframes.
I brought these low fidelity sketches into deep-dive sessions with topic owners to gather feedback on the framing of the challenges and how we’re planning to address them.
We left the workshop with cross-team alignment on the overall scope of MyHome and a number of key design artifacts that would serve as the foundation of the product.
Design Framework
We created a framework that defined the types of pages and capabilities the tool would need to have in order to enable key use cases.
Service blueprint
We created a blueprint of the customer lifecycle, identifying their key moments and needs from the time they purchase their first SAP product through its renewal.
Personas and user journeys
We identified the key customer personas and scenarios that would highlight the role MyHome could play in resolving their challenges.
Low-fidelity designs
With the product defined, I began working on sketches and wireframes that capture and communicate the capabilities of the product.
I continued to create these in the context of our primary use cases to get feedback from the topic owners.
Through these iterations, we were able to get enough detail and confidence in the direction to inform an MVP.
User research
With a functional MVP and high fidelity mockups, we recruited 26 participants from 13 customers across the globe to participate in research. We started with a kickoff with each partner where we introduced the concept and gave them access to an MVP, allowing them to provide feedback with the context of their own real data.
A week later we checked back in on how they had used the MVP and how their thinking on the concept had evolved. We then presented a high fidelity clickable prototype of the long term vision for MyHome to get their input on where the product would be going in the future.
Findings
Upon synthesizing the feedback from these partners, we found that it wasn’t enough just to centralize data; the core challenge for MyHome would be to display the right information for the right user at the right time. This pointed to three key user needs for the product.
Aggregate
MyHome needs to pull information from across customer systems into a single location where they can monitor and manage their entire landscape.
Personalize
MyHome needs to make available only the content each user is able to and wants to see based on their role, interests, and authorizations.
Prioritize
MyHome needs to surface the most important information that a user needs to know or act on right now.
Usability testing
In addition to the qualitative findings, I captured the specific feedback we received on the UX of the clickable prototype to guide the development team through future iterations of the MVP.
