#SAPTechEd 2013 Interview of the Week: Creating User Experiences that Drive Innovation for Businesses and Consumers

[Former Member]

First off I'd just like to say that I am delighted that the interview I conducted for SAP TechEd Live 2013 in Las Vegas with sam.yen (SAP's Global Head of Design and User Experience) has been selected as the interview of the week! It was my first SAP TechEd since 2006 in Amsterdam and my first as a freshly minted SAP Mentor. It was an honour to be asked to facilitate this session with Sam, it was fun and a little daunting to be on the big stage in the centre of the show floor. We had a small technical hitch (that thankfully was only ever to be seen by the live audience) when Sam's microphone didn't work... Take 2! Otherwise it all went great. :grin:

In this interview Sam and I cover the following main topics:

• Sam explains the SAP User Experience strategy (New, Renew and Enable) that covers both new and existing SAP products and applications
• We talk about Fiori - "What is Fiori?" Sam explains that Fiori is more than just a new colour scheme and some fancy tiles for mobile apps. Fiori as a paradigm is how SAP intends to harmonize the entire user experience across the whole SAP product portfolio both on premise and in the cloud. Fiori can be a bridge to deploying your organizations mobile, cloud  and HANA strategy.
• Sam describes how SAP has had a steep learning curve and has needed to bring a whole new set of skills into the organization to build these new user experiences for their products. An outcome of this has been that SAP has been asked by customers to come in as consultants and help them build up their own internal capability to deliver "Fiori-like" user experiences.
• Finally Sam gives some insight into what the future holds (some of which was subsequently announced at SAP TechEd in Amsterdam and Bangalore later in the year).

Here is the full interview, "Creating User Experiences that Drive Innovation for Businesses and Consumers".

I hope you enjoyed the interview. If you have any comments or questions please post them below. If you are interested in keeping up to date with user experience and user interface topics here on SCN I recommend you follow the User Interface Technology space.

In 2014, the SAP TechEd name will be retired and the conference will evolve into an exciting new program called SAP d-code, which will address education, collaboration, and networking for the entire SAP ecosystem of developers and technology professionals, incorporating the best elements of SAP TechEd. I am looking forward to seeing what d-code has to offer, I hope to see you there.

Simon.