What do you think about SAP UX Explorer?

[former_member88020]

Hello,

You might have found this discussion directly by browsing through SCN, or you just have been re-routed to it by SAP UX Explorer (http://uxexplorer.hana.ondemand.com).

In either way, we are very interested in your feedback about SAP UX Explorer. Let us know what you think about it.

Thank you for your contribution… 

[Former Member]

Hi Juergen,

I have to admit my first reaction was "What, another UX site from SAP!" - do we really need it? I then started looking around and there is certainly some good content and it provides a nice way to aggregate all the information that is available about the different UI options. A lot of the customers I deal with are confused about the SAP UI (good for me I suppose) and hopefully a site like this will help to clear up some of that confusion (and not add to it).

Many times I find people are after a silver bullet to solve all their UI problems, I personally don't think such a thing exists and you need to choose the right tool for the right job/situation/user group. Anything that can help get that message across is a good thing in my view.

It is a bit of a mix between educational/informational material and sales collateral - which maybe is a bit odd. Can you clarify the purpose/goal of the site?

I like the use of lots of screenshots and it is quite a nice looking site. Is it built using one of SAPs own products?

Sorry this is a bit of an unstructured brain dump of my first impressions. But I wanted to get the discussion started.

Thanks for sharing, I am interested to see where this goes and how it fits with the other UI sites SAP has (e.g. SAP Design Guild, User Experience etc...)

Simon

[former_member88020]

Hi Simon,

Thanks a lot for starting the discussion.

I fully agree to your statement. There can’t be this silver bullet that solves all issues automatically. As you said, at the end it is a very customer specific activity to build a customer UX strategy, which needs to consider many different parameters. Some of these parameters come from SAP like the SAP UX Strategy (https://uxexplorer.hana.ondemand.com/_item.html?id=140). Other parameters are totally different from customer to customer. There is an item started at https://uxexplorer.hana.ondemand.com/_item.html?id=141, that deals with the idea of creating a customer specific UX strategy. Of course, we will extend this part of our database over time.

This leads me to another point you came up with. What is the target audience and purpose of the tool, and why does it mix up different things that one would assume to be sales specific vs. developer specific.

I think today, we see people on customer’s site who work content wise somewhere between the business application teams and the IT teams. I would see them as the ones preparing investment decisions in regards to UX improvements. These guys need to understand both worlds: The value from business perspective and the impact on a technical environment. You might find all necessary information somewhere. But you might have your difficulties - without having the right starting point or a good pre-knowledge - to collect the right stuff. Not to mention that a very specific purpose (in our case UX improvements) might not directly be reflected in existing content. Think of questions like: "What is the connection between SAP NetWeaver SSO and UX" or "what is the UX relevant information in regards to SAP NetWeaver Application Server".

SAP UX Explorer is intended to cover three areas:

Explore

Find items that could be of interest

Understand
Get the main information to judge on the potential value for you, and understand the relation to other topics you haven’t thought of

Act

Find the detail resources for the items you have identified to be important for you, get a learning curriculum, generate a document with relevant information for you next meeting and much more

As we - from the SAP UX Explorer team - think that transparency is the most important requirement here, we want to bring all different aspects in regards to UX to one place. You could say we provide the UX specific glue between all the resources you might already know (e.g. SCN, SMP…). As such, SAP UX Explorer was not intended to be just another page that tells the UX story completely new or rewrites what others have already written. It was more intended to help interested people like IT project managers, technology consultants, UI developer to find a good entry point into the UX space, to help them identifying the values and to perform next steps.

Here are three typical questions I have received several times now and the related answers:

Is SAP UX Explorer tool already complete?

No. We have marked it as beta, to give ourselves enough time to bring the tool forward. As you might have read, we rely on a semantic data model that gives us a lot of opportunities we haven’t even touched so far. The “explore relation” tool is just the beginning…

Is  SAP UX Explorer content already complete?

Of course not. You might miss items that you know but they are not in our DB,  yet. These items might be in our pipeline for the next weeks and months already or we simply don’t know that these items are of interest for you. Additionally, you might miss some relations here and there. As such, it is important that we receive as much as possible feedback about the tool, but also about what you miss in the content.

What are our next plans for the second half of this year?

• Improve quality of existing content
• Include new content
• Improve tool
• Introduce features that further helps driving decisions, a graphical view on the semantic network and more…

Let me know what you think. And as said, don’t hesitate to provide feedback. That’s the only way for us to get better…

All the best,

Jürgen

[Former Member]

Hi,

is there a place to add or suggest components for review. For example I found no results for components like BEx business explorer.

BR/W

[former_member88020]

Hello Wim,

it took some time, but I can now tell that we have the SAP UX Explorer - Content Pipeline posted at: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-44179

All the best,

JJ

[former_member88020]

Hi Wim,

This is a very good point. It would be extremely important for us to understand which items you are missing. In fact, we already have a pipeline of items we are working on. But I'm sure this pipeline does not cover everything the users are looking for.

I will check how to make this pipeline visible to you. Right now I see two options:

1. Show the pipeline directly in the tool

2. Make it available here in SCN

Give me some days to provide a solution.

By the way: SAP Business Explorer (Bex) is already in our pipeline and will be there in the next 10 days.

All the best,

Jürgen

[former_member88020]

We have found out today, that SCN users were not able to get connected to SAP UX Explorer. Up to today, users with S-Users or C-Users were able to login.

We have fixed the issue today. If you still experience login issues, please let us know.

All the best,

JJ

[waldo]

Hi. I think this is just GREAT

I love comments like:

<!-- TODO: Improve markup/use h4 or something else instead of div-->

Watch out with responsive css styles. Maybe you could apply RWD here

Regards

Oswald