Solved: User Interface Fragmentation?

Former Member · ‎05-20-2013

Over the last few months, since we finally upgraded our ERP system from 4.7 to ERP6, I've been thinking particularly about our SAP user experience. The announcement of Fiori at Sapphire last week, nicely summarised in this blog by , adds another UI solution to the mix. SAP's "New, Renew, Enable" UI strategy does leave me with a problem, though. If all you do on SAP is one of the new or renewed processes/transactions, you get a nice modern user interface and all is well. Many of my users, though, use a mixture of functions on ERP6 and not all of them are new or renewed. This is likely to leave many of my users needing to use SAPgui for some transactions, and a web browser for WDA or UI5 for others. Surely other organisations will experience the same thing?

Has any thought been given to this "fragmentation" of the UX, and how users react to it? Are users happy to have different places to go for different functions, or do they prefer to have everything on one place with a (reasonably) consistent, albeit clunky, design? I imagine that's going to vary by user, but maybe there are some studies that have some general conclusions? Anyone know?

Former Member · ‎05-21-2013

Hi Steve,

You certainly bring up a good point and something I see at many customers I work with. While providing a unified user experience is certainly important and in an ideal world all the SAP screens would look and act in the same intuitive way - users would not care or even know what UI technology they are using. Unfortunately this utopia is a long way off and I am not even sure if it would ever be possible.

What I focus on when I work with customers is getting the right tools in the hands of the fight group of users. Power users in FI would probably start kicking and screaming if you took their beloved SAPGUI screens away from them! However a maintenance technician would probably love a nice fast way to complete their work orders without ever going near the SAPGUI (or near the office for that matter). So I try to focus on the user groups and tailoring a solution around what serves them best.

Interested to hear what others think too.

Cheers,

Simon

Former Member · ‎05-21-2013

Hi Steve,

You certainly bring up a good point and something I see at many customers I work with. While providing a unified user experience is certainly important and in an ideal world all the SAP screens would look and act in the same intuitive way - users would not care or even know what UI technology they are using. Unfortunately this utopia is a long way off and I am not even sure if it would ever be possible.

What I focus on when I work with customers is getting the right tools in the hands of the fight group of users. Power users in FI would probably start kicking and screaming if you took their beloved SAPGUI screens away from them! However a maintenance technician would probably love a nice fast way to complete their work orders without ever going near the SAPGUI (or near the office for that matter). So I try to focus on the user groups and tailoring a solution around what serves them best.

Interested to hear what others think too.

Cheers,

Simon

Former Member · ‎05-21-2013

Certainly where you have users focused on a single area of functionality this is less of an issue, I agree. We do have users like that here. Accountants would sit in front of SAPgui, maintenance guys & gals would use MAM or similar. But in a University we have a lot of "general" users. Each academic department operates largely standalone and has an administrator that needs to do everything - financial reporting, HR, purchasing, sales sometimes. This is the type of user I imagine wouldn't take kindly to UI fragmentation.

If the new UIs are sufficiently better than SAPgui (not hard, perhaps:-) then maybe they would be happy anyway? I was just wondering if anyone had direct experience of this scenario, or if it had been studied at all by the SAP UX folks?

Steve.

former_member88020 · ‎05-24-2013

Hi Steve,

Maybe I can help a little bit to guide you into the right direction.

First of all, SAP Fiori is a set of applications that are build with SAPUI5 communicating through rest-based services with SAP NetWeaver Gateway. While you may already know that, I just wanted to underline that it doesn't introduce a new UI technology to our portfolio.

In many cases, I would believe that a standard user today deals with Dynpro ABAP- and Web Dynpro ABAP-based applications.Here and there (like with Fiori), the user might also see SAPUI5-based applications. So I fully see your point that it would be quite annoying to desktop users to switch from SAPGUI to browsers back and forth.

Have you already considered testing SAP NetWeaver Business Client for Desktop or SAP NetWeaver Business Client for HTML for your scenario? Both provide a shell that handles navigation and technical stuff like session handling, while its content area (called canvas) can be used to render Dynpro ABAP-based or any web-based application. For the scenario you are describing this could be a good solution that even provides you additional, optional opportunities if you want (e.g. NWBC Sidepanels, Landing Page integration...)

I would be interested to see whether this could be a solution for you.

Looking forward to your feedback,

Jürgen

Former Member · ‎05-24-2013

Thanks for that. I confess I don't know as much about Business Client as I would like. It does sound like it might be a way to pull various UI technologies together into a single reasonably coherent place. I guess I've got some more research to do!

Thanks,

Steve.

former_member88020 · ‎05-24-2013

Hi Steve,

if you follow the links, you will get into the relevant areas of SAP UX Explorer. There you can find more information about all items I have talked about (except Fiori - will be integrated soon).

You can also always access SAP UX Explorer via http://uxexplorer.hana.ondemand.com

All the best,

Jürgen