Three Years SAP Design Guild – A Review

By Christine Wiegand & Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, SAP User Experience, SAP Design Guild Team – March 20, 2003

The SAP Design Guild celebrates its third anniversary in April, so it's once again time to look back – and also to consider the future.

 

Looking Back...

The previous year has been characterized by some changes to the SAP Design Guild Website. For the accessibility edition at the beginning of 2002, the SAP Design Guild produced a new look that closely resembled the SAP Enterprise Portal 5.0 and was more accessible. We switched from a frame design to a table layout, which makes it easier to bookmark pages.

We made the last major change to the Website's structure in the summer by moving the Editions to the top level for better visibility and faster access. This reflects the importance of this section for the SAP Design Guild.

In October 2002, we published an edition on collaboration, which was followed by an edition on branding in February 2003. Both topics are highly relevant in the portal field. The collaboration edition was also accompanied by a design overhaul, creating a closer resemblance between the SAP Design Guild and the SAP.com Website. There were also some minor structural changes, most of them only visible on the internal SAP version of the Website.

We won't bombard you with details of all the other additions and changes to the SAP Design Guild here – you can find them in the News and in the Newsletter archives.

In October 2002, Ramona Winkler left the SAP Design Guild Team to take over new duties in the xApps field. We are very much indebted to her for her good work and her commitment to the SAP Design Guild Website.

 

Looking Inside...

We took time to look at our visitor statistics more closely again in 2002. We also analyzed where our newsletter subscribers come from and which business areas they are involved in. While we cannot determine exact numbers here, we know that the number of daily visitors increased continually over 2002, with more than a five-fold increase during the year. The numbers have fluctuated at the beginning of 2003 but are still at a high level. Interestingly, we had the largest number of visitors ever at the beginning of the year, when people started working after the Christmas holiday season. People seemed to be eager to see what was new on the Website.

We have also discovered that there are lots of accidental visitors to the SAP Design Guild, in common with all Websites. Many visitors find us via Google when searching for particular terms or images. A lot a visitors come to the SAP Design Guild, For example, when searching for a rose picture. To take advantage of that, we are including cat and dog images in this article – that will certainly boost our visitor numbers...

cat      dog

Figure 1 and 2: The SAP Design Guild uses "unfair" measures to attract visitors – here are pictures of a cat and a dog (pictures by G. Waloszek)

Subscribers to the SAP Design Guild newsletter come from a wide range of industries. Most of them, unsurprisingly, work in the IT field. The majority come from Europe, followed closely by North America. Asia is behind but catching up with quite a few subscribers from India and China.

We have also found that much of the lore about the behavior of search engines is not true. We used more than 200 search items to test, whether and when the SAP Design Guild appeared in the Google hit list. According to our investigation, overloading pages with masses of META information seems to have little or no effect. Instead, a page title that makes sense and useful page content, including well structured header tags, appear to lead to good rankings. That is actually good news because it encourages page designers to be honest and to deliver useful and well-structured content.

 

Looking Forward...

What will the following year hold for the SAP Design Guild and its visitors? We are fairly confident in predicting that there will be an edition on SAP's new xApps in the middle of 2003. We are also planning a further edition by the end of the year on a topic that we can't currently disclose – so, watch out for that. There are also rumors about the inclusion of an xApps section in the SAP Design Guild but these are not yet confirmed.

There may also be a change to the style guides in the Resources section. The Usability Engineering Center at SAP is currently testing a card-based version of its style guides for Sap's Web applications, to replace the iView, IAC, and HTMLB guidelines. This new style guide consists of different types of cards that typically contain one rule and is based on a database engine that allows filtering and further interactions. We are currently testing a static version of this style guide on the SAP-internal version of the SAP Design Guild; it resembles the existing style guides more closely but lacks the interaction options of the database version. We hope to be able to offer the new style guide publicly in the course of this year.

 

Final Word

As it enters its fourth year, the SAP Design Guild Website has matured and become a sought-after resource in the UI and graphic design world. While it is most relevant to people working in the SAP environment, there is a wealth of information that is interesting to other visitors who are active in the UI and design field too. The previous editions are a good example of this: Accessibility, collaboration, and branding are topics that excite wide interest.

The SAP Design Guild Team will continue along this avenue and offer "basic" and "surplus" resources and information to the UI and design community.

 

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