Contextual Design at SAP

By Karen Holtzblatt, President and Hugh R. Beyer, InContext Enterprises – April 2000

Disclaimer: Please note that this article was written in 2000. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding stratey, and organizational structure, are no longer valid.

Abstract

Contextual Design is a state-of-the-art approach to designing products directly from an understanding of how the customer works. Since 1998 and the beginning of the ENJOY effort, many SAP product teams, marketers, user interface designers and usability professionals have gone to the field to understand how their customers work before starting to specify and code products. The results can be seen in products such as the travel planning and accounting applications.

Since 1998 and the beginning of the ENJOY effort SAP product teams, marketers, user interface designers, and usability professionals have designed products using Contextual Design. This new approach is the state of the art to designing directly from an understanding of how the customer works. Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer, the developers of Contextual Design and founders of InContext Enterprises, have coached SAP teams in using this process to produce new designs such as the Travel Planning and Accounting applications. As a result of these efforts, more and more SAP teams are going to the field to understand how their customers work before starting to specify and code products.

Contextual Design is a front-end design process that provides teams with a coherent set of steps from customer data to the final design. Great product ideas come from a marriage of the detailed understanding of a customer need with the in-depth understanding of technology. The best product designs happen when the product's designers are involved in collecting and interpreting customer data and appreciate what real people need.

 

The Techniques of Contextual Design Include:

Field Data Collection

The design team conducts one-on-one field interviews with customers in their workplace to discover what matters in the work. A contextual interviewer observes users as they work and inquires into the users' actions as they unfold to understand their motivations and strategy. The interviewer and user, through discussion, develop a shared interpretation of the work. Team interpretation sessions bring a cross-functional team together to hear the whole story of an interview and capture the insights and learning relevant to their design problem. An interpretation session lets everyone on the team bring their unique perspective to the data, sharing design, marketing, and business implications. Through these discussions, the team captures issues, draws work models, and develops a shared view of the customer whose data is being interpreted and their needs. 		  Observing a user during a site visit

Work Modeling

People's work is complex and full of detail. It's also intangible -- there's no good way to write down or talk about work practice. Design teams seldom have the critical skill of seeing the structure of work done by others, looking past the surface detail to see the intents, strategies, and motivations that control how work is done.
Work models capture the work of individuals and organizations in diagrams. Five different models provide five perspectives on how work is done: the flow model captures communication and coordination, the cultural model captures culture and policy, the sequence model shows the detailed steps performed to accomplish a task, the physical model shows the physical environment as it supports the work, and the artifact model shows how artifacts are used and structured in doing the work.
Systems are seldom designed for a single customer. But designing for a whole customer population -- the market, department, or organization that will use the system -- depends on seeing the common aspects of the work different people do. Consolidation brings data from individual customer interviews together so the team can see common pattern and structure without losing individual variation.
   Flow model

Visioning and Storyboarding

The redesigned work practice is captured in a vision, a story of how customers will do their work in the new world we invent. A vision includes the system, its delivery, and support structures to make the new work practice successful. The team develops the details of the vision in storyboards, 'freeze-frame' sketches capturing scenarios of how people will work with the new system. 		  Storyboard frame

User Environment Design

The new system must have the appropriate function and structure to support a natural flow of work through the system. Just as architects draw floor plans to see the structure and flow of a house, designers need to see the 'floor plan' of their new system -- hidden behind user interface drawings, implemented by an object model, and responding to the customer work. The User Environment Design captures the floor plan of the new system. It shows each part of the system, how it supports the user's work, exactly what function is available in that part, and how the user gets to and from other parts of the system. The User Environment design helps a team ensure the structure is right for the user, plan how to roll out new features in a series of releases, and manage the work of the project across engineering teams without compromising the coherence of the system as experienced by the user. 		  User environment design

Paper Prototyping

Paper prototyping develops rough mockups of the system using Post-its to represent windows, dialog boxes, buttons, and menus. The design team tests these prototypes with users in their workplace, replaying real work events in the proposed system. When the user discovers problems, they and the designers redesign the prototype together to fit their needs. Rough paper prototypes of the system design test the structure of a User Environment Design and initial user interface ideas before anything is committed to code. Paper prototypes support continuous iteration of the new system, keeping it true to the user needs. Refining the design with users gives designers a customer-centered way to resolve disagreements and work out the next layer of requirements. 		  Paper prototype

Contextual Design is used and taught all over the world in companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, SAP, Nokia, Novell and other major players in the software industry.

 

InContext at SAP

As part of the ENJOY effort SAP developers have worked with InContext coaches to apply Contextual Design techniques to their product designs. Some of these projects are described below. For the mySAP.com effort, InContext is doing a special Internet Insight Report on business to business relationships and design implications for the mySAP.com marketplace and workplace solutions. Overall, SAP has been aggressive in getting to know their customers and adopt customer-centered design techniques over the last several years. We look forward to better and more usable products in the future because of these teams’ hard work and commitment.

Many developers, managers, and marketers across SAP have been going to the field to understand their customers and drive that understanding into the product design. These efforts are supported by overall company-wide training in Contextual Design, by usability professionals rolling out the philosophy and techniques of talking with the customer, and by the work of individual teams. Some customer-centered design projects coached by InContext directly include:

Travel Application

The travel team developed the new travel planning and expense reporting applications. This application has been well received by the users and is now a showcase product for the mySAP.com workplace. It has reported the highest usability test results of any product tested.

SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW)

The BW research group put together a team of researchers and members of the BW application team. Together we explored the requirements for reliable business data reporting and easy to use data entry. As a result of the study some changes were able to be rolled into the current product and we look forward to the innovative ideas that the research group will do in the future.

BW Administration

The BW administration team collected data on how users were responding to the process they put in place for building the information cubes that drive the BW reporting. Results will affect the overall ease of data definition within this application.

R/3 reporting

The usability professionals, user interface designers, and developers from across R/3 applications banded together to look at reporting in the existing R3 applications. This project pushed simple changes to the individual teams and helped the cross-functional team come up with new ideas of how reporting could be improved.

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