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Happy Anniversary Horizon!
Time passed quickly and we are thrilled to celebrate the third anniversary of the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori - an integral part of our User Experience (UX) design. Over these years, Horizon has evolved and seamlessly integrated into SAP's product portfolio, providing our users with a simplified, personalized, and engaging user experience.
How did it start?
Born out of rigorous testing and research, Horizon has tremendously transformed how millions of users interact with SAP software. Its introduction marked a significant paradigm shift in SAP's design model and marks the entry of a revolutionary user experience across all products. Chris Allen, Head of SAP Design Systems and Language, focused on many design trends and led the core team to explore several directions. UX Designers Gerard Keane and Simone Daiber were co-leading the team of designers working on the creation of Horizon visual language foundations for web applications, including visual design specifications for UI components. The core design team worked closely with product designers representing every line of business to contribute ideas and iterate on them together. A close alignment and iterative approach with technology ensured a seamless implementation of the new Horizon visual theme – a truly collaborative effort across the entire company.
“While the core team focused on the visual design for Horizon to achieve a more, inclusive and accessible look and feel, the idea was also to give more power and flexibility to the different product areas so they could develop their own product-specific innovations as well.” (Gerard Keane, UX Designer at SAP)
Building an identity
With Horizon, the design team followed a joint vision to not only create a new face for SAP Fiori, but to connect themes and how they are set up technically. The team around Gerard and Simone worked hard to create a theming system with design tokens that enable a simple and consistent way to implement the styles adhering to the latest accessibility standards for all supported themes across all of the SAP UI technologies. The Horizon theme family consists of not only light and dark theme variants, but also high-contrast black and white to that ensure a fully inclusive user experience for all SAP customers. Check out the design token and theming design guidelines for more details.
“We were no longer handing over mockups and started to create tokens a developer could actually use.” (Gerard Keane, UX Designer at SAP)
Trial and error, disruptive ideas plus lots of feedback and iterations were involved in the process. Grey input fields seemed to be neat and tidy, however they had to go: users didn’t recognize they could actually write into those input fields, they appeared to be greyed out. Another first with Horizon was the “switch”. When Horizon was introduced, users could switch the new theme on or off again with a toggle in the header bar. This was a great way for users to get a glimpse of and get used to the new theme at their own pace.
“The best thing about Horizon is, that it could strike a spark to inspire SAP design leadership in both brand and product design to work together towards a more inclusive, shared company visual identity.” (Gerard Keane)
The Horizon was specially created to be compliant with web accessibility standards and heavily influenced SAP’s corporate branding and members of the project have been working closely with SAP Branding ever since Horizon was introduced to ensure a consistent experience for our customers and users.
Horizon’s impact and evolution:
Our commitment to putting our users front and center, coupled with the beauty of Horizon, has ensured it’s not just about aesthetic appeal, but also about enhancing the overall efficiency and inclusivity of businesses.
To understand Horizon's impact, let's recap its innovative features and how they've brought about significant changes.
- Improved visualization: The Horizon visual theme offers a clean, modern interface with appealing visuals, increasing software usability.
- Personalization: Horizon allows users to personalize their SAP Fiori applications, a step towards shaping applications per the user's role, tasks, and preference, thus, enhancing productivity.
- Responsive design: In our digitally-driven world, being device agnostic is critical. With Horizon's responsive and adaptive design, users can access SAP Fiori applications from any device – smartphone, tablet, or desktop – keeping businesses connected and agile.
With SAP S/4HANA being a frontrunner and leading example, Horizon has been at the forefront, making tasks simpler and more streamlined for users. The evolution has not stopped; instead, it continues to build on its earlier successes, contributing significantly to SAP's vision of a user-centric design approach. And our customers and users agree:
“It’s just easier to navigate what you want to see.”
“New (theme) is visually better, the colors are more friendly – (I) can imagine to use it on the iPad.”
“(The theme) is leading edge – it is modern, interesting, easy to navigate, and supportive.”
The Future begins today
As we step into the fourth year of Horizon's life, our aim remains unchanged – to create intuitive, business-oriented, and visually appealing software experiences. With new technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, our commitment to enhancing our users’ experience is unwavering.
While we celebrate Horizon's third anniversary, our teams are already at work, using user feedback to further refine this ever-evolving visual theme. In fact, you can check out some of the Improvements to the Horizon Visual Theme from last year based on feedback and insights from our users. We continually aim to bridge the gap between functionality and inclusive usability, providing our users with software experiences that are as enriching as they are productive.
Finally, we’d like to express our deepest gratitude to our customers, partners, and team members who have been pivotal in making this journey successful. Here's to creating more experiences, solving more challenges, and revolutionizing more processes with Horizon.
Happy Birthday, Horizon!
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