Leading Article: History of SAP Design Guild Editions
By Gerd Waloszek, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – March 3, 2010
We've already mentioned it a number of times and in a number of different
places: This eleventh edition of the SAP Design Guild Website is a very special
one, because it foreshadows and celebrates the upcoming 10th anniversary of
the Website in April 2010. And it is also special in the way in which it will
be published. It will be a "growing" or "cumulative" edition
with articles being added in the course of the anniversary year. Consequently,
we are all excited about what the final edition will look like. At the moment,
however, we are just starting out on this adventure. Perhaps this is a good
opportunity to look back and talk about the previous ten editions we published
on the SAP Design Guild Website. The leading article for the new edition seems
like the perfect place for just such a review.
"Editions" were added as a new ingredient to the SAP Design Guild Website at a very early stage: The first edition was published in August 2000, the second in December 2000. Typically, we managed to publish one or two editions per year, but we were not always able to maintain this pace, because finding authors and motivating them to finish their articles in time was often hard work. The editorial team of the SAP Design Guild generally worked with a "chair" or "patron" for each edition. This person was an expert on the edition's topic, supported us in finding and contacting authors, motivated them to get their articles ready in time, and often also wrote the leading article for the edition.
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Figures 1-3: Logos of the first three editions
The first SAP Design Guild edition published in mid-2000 offered articles about the mySAP workplace. The workplace concept was a novelty at the time and pushed the notion of an integrated business environment far beyond the current R/3 user interface. SAP's R/3 enterprise software already offered a high level of integration below the surface, but did not take advantage of it in the user interface. The workplace set out to close this gap. User roles were another new concept that was introduced around this time. Roles served to customize the workplace, and later on, the portal according to the users' responsibilities in a company. The workplace was initially built with existing technology, but a number of articles were already discussing something even newer: portals, which were based on Web technology. Portals, particularly enterprise portals, were given extensive coverage in the third edition of the SAP Design Guild, which defined portal concepts, discussed portal design issues, and even presented initial portal prototypes. In the meantime, we also published the "reporting edition," which not only covered reporting design issues and new concepts such as analytical applications, but also presented initial role-specific portal prototypes.
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Figures 4-5: Logos of the Accessibility editions (edition 4 and edition 9)
All in all, the first three editions covered topics that were – for the most part – closely related. Edition four, however, introduced a new topic that had started gaining increasing attention and relevance at the beginning of the third millennium: accessibility. SAP had established an Accessibility Competence Center (ACC) in Palo Alto, and, together with our Palo Alto ACC colleagues (edition chair was Dena Shumila), we published an edition full of helpful articles about accessibility topics. The ACC later moved to SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. So, because things were moving fast in the accessibility field, we decided to update the accessibility edition with another one in 2005 (with Urte Thoelke serving as chair). This was our 9th edition and was still being extended with new articles until recently.
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Figures 6-7: Logos of the Collaboration and xApps editions (edition 5 and edition 7)
Editions 5 (2002) and 7 (2003) were both published in cooperation with Jörg Beringer, who introduced innovative topics such as collaboration and cross applications (xApps). Jörg was also able to invite and motivate external authors to contribute to both editions, including John Seely Brown from XEROX, whom I had met in the 1980s when we had a XEROX Lisp machine in our research project at the university. Regrettably, a third edition conceived by Jörg about knowledge workers never came into being – but the opportunity is still there...
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Figures 8-9: Logos of the Branding and User Productivity editions (edition 6 and edition 8)
Edition 6, published in early 2003, covered branding and visual design, and brought the SAP Design Guild back to its roots. The SAP Design Guild Website was initiated, together with SAP CEO Hasso Plattner, by Peer Hilgers and Leif Jensen-Pistorius from SAP's Product Design Center (PDC). This was the name of SAP's visual design team initially and for quite some time. The SAP Design Guild's editorial team belonged to the PDC until the end of 2004 – that is, for about half of the SAP Design Guild's existence. Thus, this edition, chaired by Esther Blankenship, was a home run – and, admittedly, a lot of fun.
Figure 10: Logo of edition 10, the SAP User Experience edition
There are two other editions that I would like to mention. They portray SAP's usability team at two different stages, and have two different names, depending in the usability group's name at those particular points in time. At the end of 2004, the User Productivity edition was published in cooperation with SAP INFO. It provided an overview of SAP's usability activities at that time. Matthias Vering was in charge of these activities at the time and he who also wrote the leading article. In 2005, Dan Rosenberg took responsibility for SAP's usability activities and renamed the group SAP User Experience, or SAP UX for short. This name has remained unchanged for nearly five years now and will hopefully stay the same for many more years to come. Toward the end of 2006, we published the SAP User Experience edition, once again updating our account of SAP's usability team and activities. Although this edition was started more than three years ago, it has had new articles added to it in the intervening years and can still be regarded as a valid account of the latest happenings in the user experience field at SAP.
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Figure 11-12: Logos of the highlight topics Universal Usability and Human Performance at the Computer
Because it was becoming more and more difficult to motivate colleagues to contribute articles to editions, the SAP Design Guild editorial team decided to adopt a different approach. By 2007, we had published a large number of articles about universal usability. We therefore decided to create an article collection that we called a "highlight topic." Highlight topics provide a coherent, easy-access framework for recently published articles focusing on a specific theme. The highlight topic about universal usability was published toward the end of 2007 and was later extended with further articles. In 2008, I was involved in an internal SAP project about perceived performance. Utilizing synergies between my different job responsibilities, I published quite a few articles about this topic on the SAP Design Guild. These articles lent themselves to being integrated into a new highlight topic – and our second highlight topic entitled Human Performance at the Computer was born.
Figure 13: Logo of the Philosophy edition
Finally, you may be wondering about the Philosophy edition. Admittedly, this was never a "real" edition. The articles in this edition were initially presented in a section called Innovation. They captured the ideas and the impetus behind SAP's Enjoy initiative, which began in 1998 and which revolutionized the way business applications are designed. In order to preserve these ideas, we rearranged the articles – some of which were written when the site was prototyped at frog design in Austin, Texas – in a separate edition.
This concludes my tour of SAP Design Guild editions and highlight topics. As already stated at the beginning of this article, edition 11 takes a different approach: While former editions and highlight topics were – with a few exceptions – published in one go, the new edition will be published incrementally. It also resembles a highlight topic, because most of the articles will probably be contributed by the editorial team. But we do not know for sure. At the moment, edition 11 is something of an adventure. We'll have to wait until this time next year to find out what it has actually evolved into.
