Monthly Highlights from the SAP User Experience Community - March 3rd

[former_member182902]

Hello everyone,

February brought a flurry of new and interesting posts to the SAP User Experience Community. In this blog post, I’ll summarize the ones you might find most interesting.

The SAP User Experience Community is a public community dedicated to the exchange of ideas and knowledge about design and
user experience. The Community is for everyone interested in design and user experience, so join the conversation!

In Learn the basics about design and user experience:

• If being visual is way out of your comfort zone, then you’re not alone. Discover how picking up a pen and getting a little more visual could help you reach the person you’re communicating with in a much more open, honest, and authentic way. Read and see! more in this very nice post by Varik Torsteinsen, Connecting and Convincing with Creative Confidence – The Basics.
• In a new addition to our UX basics in 500 words or less series, check out What is Gamification? by Hanna Kieser.
• People understand icons based on their unique, past experiences. That makes icon design particularly challenging. This post, Four Simple Rules for Better Icon Design, by Holger Maassen addresses 4 things to consider when designing icons.

In Skill up on design and user experience:

• In When Time Matters: Designing High-Speed UIs, Bernard Rummel describes methods for creating high-speed UIs: when users are trained to the very end of the learning curve and it’s now about designing the UI to squeeze milliseconds out of task cycle time.
• Ever heard of a non-pictorial wireframe? Sound like a contradiction in terms? Then read Holger Maassen’s latest post, Page Description Diagram to find out about textual wireframes.
• When SAP first released SAP Screen Personas, it was a standalone solution to render simplified SAP GUI screens in the browser. Now, SAP Screen Personas has become a personalization framework integrated into the SAP GUI family.Customers can use SAP Screen Personas to modernize SAP GUI screens to look like SAP Fiori or match their corporate design guidelines. In this new post by Peter Spielvogel, How SAP Screen Personas Fits the 2015 SAP UX Strategy, get a quick look at the priorities for 2015.

• Our UX and Design leadership team, under Sam Yen, are providing perspectives,insight and inspiration through a series of blogs published on SAP Business Trends. Check out this post SAP UX and Design Leadership Team Share Insights and Inspiration by Katie Moser for a summary of all the posts in this series. (BTW, Katie is continuously updating the post!)
• Don’t miss the openSAP Course Starting March 25th – Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud. The goal of this course is to introduce you to the tools, methodologies, and best practices for designing, creating, and enhancing your very own SAP Fiori app. Thanks to Christina Schlosser for this post!

In Design News from SAP:

• Want to transform the sterile, run of the mill, office spaces in your organization into attractive, modern surroundings that dramatically increase creativity and innovation? Let Alan Daifuku, Director of AppHaus Enablement, share his best practices in Boosting Creativity and Collaboration by Renovating SAP’s Office Spaces.
• One of the challenges of rolling out new enterprise software is getting the user population up-to-speed on it. SAP's new built-in onboarding and user assistance is making this smooth, simple, and pain-free. Read on in All Aboard! Innovative New Onboarding for SAP Apps by Janis Shuttleworth.
• The biggest challenge today in retail is meeting customer expectations. In this post by Holger Maassen, Hybris & SAP – Combining Forces for a Better UX in Omni Channel Commerce, find out how SAP can help
• XX+UX is an event for women (XX) in the field of User Experiences (UX) to meet and mingle. Read about XX+UX Happy Hour for Women at SAP Palo Alto by Tina Tuan for more.
• SAP is very happy to announce the public availability of the newly released SAP Fiori, demo cloud edition. A cloud-based, simple way to explore and experience SAP Fiori User Experience and applications across lines of business, tasks and devices. Read more in Experience SAP Fiori in the Cloud with SAP Fiori Demo Cloud Edition by Aviad Rivlin.
• User Experience Information Package – Strategy, Innovations and Services by Katie Moser has been updated. In this post, you can find out how to get more information about SAP’s UX strategy, innovations and services.

New in Participate in improving products with SAP:

• Drive.SAP is a web application that enables customers to quickly and easily give SAP feedback on screenshots and mock-ups of potential new software solutions. Get a better picture of this new tool by reading this post, Drive.SAP – Fast Feedback on Screenshots and Mock-Ups, from Brian Murray.

And of course check out our Discussion Forum for lots of interesting questions, thoughts and tips about design and UX.

I hope you find this post of highlights useful, but keep in mind that it is not comprehensive of all the activity on the community during the last month. Checkout the SAP User Experience Community to discover the interesting contributions that I left
out of this post!

Thanks for your interest in the SAP User Experience Community and please, join the conversation!

Esther