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SAP User Experience Q1/2025 Update – Part 1: Many New Innovations Available (AI, Joule and More)

ThomasReiss
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
‎2025 Feb 10 6:24 PM
4,698

This series of posts gives an overview of user experience innovations in the cloud from the last six months, covering our whole portfolio, in particular SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502. It also gives an overview of innovations in our UI technologies, making it ever easier to build and integrate UIs.

AI is revolutionizing user experience, giving users capabilities unheard of just a few years ago. SAP is harnessing the power of AI to help business users work more effectively: Joule is your copilot for seamless access to a variety of products a user needs, now covering 80% of the most-used transactions. Generative AI embedded in business applications gives users unprecedented insights and convenience. Beyond that, we continue to provide new applications with a great user experience, as well as UX-enhancing features.

How is AI, and especially generative AI, changing user experience for business users? Essentially via one or more of these patterns:

  • Summarizing business data in an easy to understand way – in text or graphical form.
  • Guiding and Recommending options or actions based on the current business context.
  • Creating proposals for texts or business data and entities such as assignments, performance goals with milestones etc., often based on natural language input.
  • Helping you write texts to people internally and externally, with our AI writing assistant.
  • Interacting via natural language with your application, e.g. search, filtering, analytical queries – as an alternative to established UI interactions.
  • Assisting you with all of the above, wherever you are, for all our cloud products – via Joule, your copilot for SAP systems.

Our overarching goal is to provide a great user experience everywhere. AI is a powerful means for achieving that, but of course you can also have a great user experience in applications without embedded AI.

A good user experience also needs to address teamwork, not just the experience of each individual – in other words, helping SAP users collaborate and work together.

I’ve collected examples from our latest releases to show how we are doing this – starting with our cross-product UX innovations in Joule and central entry points before looking at product UX innovations. Here is what the series will cover; as each part becomes available in the next couple of weeks I will update this list with links to each post:

  1. Central UX Services (this post)
    • Joule – latest UX innovations
    • Central entry points and services:
      • SAP Start / SAP Build Work Zone
      • SAP Task Center
      • SAP Mobile Start
  2. ERP: SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502 and SAP Fiori launchpad (AI, Joule and More).
  3. HR: SAP SuccessFactors (AI, Joule and More).
  4. Spend: SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass.
  5. Selling: SAP Customer Experience and SAP Industry Cloud – Retail.
  6. Analytics and Platform: SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Technology Platform.
  7. UI Design and Technology for web and mobile.

Before we get started: if you haven’t already seen them, do have a look at the overview of public cloud UX innovations I posted in February and July 2024:

This series of posts includes Joule and AI UX highlights from the above products, but for a more comprehensive overview of our recent AI innovations and SAP’s Business AI strategy, with many UX examples, have a look at:

Joule User Experience Innovations

Joule is the AI-powered copilot for SAP systems, offering a powerful new user experience, using natural language to access our cloud products and providing a seamless flow for the user.

Now, Joule is generally available for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502, as well as for our central entry points in the web SAP Start and SAP Build Work Zone (both standard and advanced editions). You can find examples in the respective product sections in this series; this section focusses on generic capabilities recently introduced or coming soon for Joule. If you want an overview of what’s new, or want to set up Joule in your landscape, have a look at the documentation:

Joule already covers 80% of the most-used transactions in SAP systems and 1,200+ skills, tailored to business roles across SAP’s cloud portfolio such as hiring manager, billing specialist, procurement manager etc.

Joule Available on Mobile

Joule is also now generally available for mobile, running natively with SAP Mobile Start. Figure 1 shows examples of Joule running on a mobile phone.

Figure 1: Examples showing Joule integrated in SAP Mobile Start, showing from left to right: the start page, the informational pattern accessing SAP Help Portal, and the transactional pattern used to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and then with SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Four images are shown: the start page shows a “How can I help you” text, followed by some suggested prompts as buttons; the informational pattern shows the prompt “How can I customize a sales order”. Below that, the sixteen-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. The navigational pattern shows the prompt “Show sales orders with delivery status not completed”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines and an “Open” button. A second transactional example with the prompt “Show profile of Maria Alvares”, followed by the result and a button for navigating to her profile.Figure 1: Examples showing Joule integrated in SAP Mobile Start, showing from left to right: the start page, the informational pattern accessing SAP Help Portal, and the transactional pattern used to interact with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and then with SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Four images are shown: the start page shows a “How can I help you” text, followed by some suggested prompts as buttons; the informational pattern shows the prompt “How can I customize a sales order”. Below that, the sixteen-line written answer is shown, followed by a “Search results” selector and three top search results. The navigational pattern shows the prompt “Show sales orders with delivery status not completed”, below that, the reply from Joule “Here’s what I’ve found” is followed by a card containing three lines and an “Open” button. A second transactional example with the prompt “Show profile of Maria Alvares”, followed by the result and a button for navigating to her profile.

On Apple devices you can now use Siri and Siri Shortcuts to seamlessly interact with Joule - which works even better with Apple Intelligence. Simply say "Hey Siri, ask SAP. Show my sales orders with delivery status not completed" and Joule will provide you with the respective content within the app.

Note that as of today, not all your prompts and web apps are supported on the phone; however, we are continuously adding further Joule business skills and scenarios.

Find out more here:

Joule Analytical Pattern coming soon

In Q1/2025 we plan to provide a controlled release of the new analytical pattern for Joule, for those products listed above for which Joule is available. General availability currently planned for Q2/2025 (as usual for forward-looking statements, our plans are subject to change). It is powered by SAP Analytics Cloud, with data from models that are indexed by the Just Ask feature of SAP Analytics Cloud.

This means that Joule will soon support four interaction patterns, as shown in Figure 2.

  1. Informational pattern, for querying written documents, such as SAP documentation in the SAP Help Portal, or customer policies etc.
  2. Navigational pattern, for finding and navigating to applications.
  3. Transactional pattern, for interacting directly with business applicatinos
  4. Planned New: Analytical pattern, for answering analytical queries directly in Joule.

Figure 2: Joule Interaction Patterns. ALT text: four interaction patterns are shown: informational, with the prompt “what are the key rules for a team outing” followed by an eight-line answer and a link to a source document; navigational, showing a button “Go to Org Chart” after approving a position; transactional, with the text “Below are the new position details set to be hired starting today”, followed by a card summarizing the key details, and a prompt by the user “Send for approval”; Analytical, showing the prompt “What is the hiring versus attrition trend for this job role in the past 12 months?” and the answer shown as a chart with one line for hired and one for percentage attrition, plus numbers showing 124 similar roles hired and 6 role attrition.Figure 2: Joule Interaction Patterns. ALT text: four interaction patterns are shown: informational, with the prompt “what are the key rules for a team outing” followed by an eight-line answer and a link to a source document; navigational, showing a button “Go to Org Chart” after approving a position; transactional, with the text “Below are the new position details set to be hired starting today”, followed by a card summarizing the key details, and a prompt by the user “Send for approval”; Analytical, showing the prompt “What is the hiring versus attrition trend for this job role in the past 12 months?” and the answer shown as a chart with one line for hired and one for percentage attrition, plus numbers showing 124 similar roles hired and 6 role attrition.

Find out more about Joule for Analytics in this blog post:

Outlook

We are working on making Joule available for further cloud products, as well as making it even more useful via agentic-AI, where Joule coordinates multi-agent systems. An AI agent can autonomously plan, reason, access external tools, work with other agents, and iteratively reflect on progress until it achieves its objective.

Joule will help SAP’s cloud users work faster, get instant insights, and achieve better outcomes by simply asking questions or telling the system what to do. Not only in English, but in their own language. We plan to allow users to interact with Joule in a growing number of languages including German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. To get an idea of what is planned and what it could look like, accessing multiple products, using English and Spanish (with subtitles), have a look at this:

For more details of what is planned, have a look at the road map for Joule in the SAP Road Map Explorer:

Central entry points and services

SAP Start

The integration with Joule in SAP Start is now generally available. The purpose of SAP Start is to bring together relevant business information from SAP for each user in one central place, and also to provide the one place to go to start your SAP applications in the cloud. SAP Start:

  • Gives you quick access to all your applications via the simple yet powerful search field;
  • New: Gives you direct access to your product home pages, as shown in Figure 3.
  • Proactively informs you about your to-dos from all products which are connected to the SAP Task Center;
  • Gives you key insights via insights cards from products connected to SAP Start,
  • Assists you with Joule, your copilot for working with SAP.

Figure 3: SAP Start, now with direct access to product home pages. This example shows direct access to three product home pages in the “Products” section: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Below the “Products” section the screen shows the To-Dos section, with four cards for pending tasks, the first three with Approve and Reject buttons on them. Below that, the Insights section is shown, with two rows of four cards, starting with lists of My Statements of Work, My Workers, My Team, List of Top 4 Customer Projects.Figure 3: SAP Start, now with direct access to product home pages. This example shows direct access to three product home pages in the “Products” section: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors. ALT Text: Below the “Products” section the screen shows the To-Dos section, with four cards for pending tasks, the first three with Approve and Reject buttons on them. Below that, the Insights section is shown, with two rows of four cards, starting with lists of My Statements of Work, My Workers, My Team, List of Top 4 Customer Projects.

Now, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Integrated Business Planning support SAP Start, in addition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Fieldglass. Other cloud products can be integrated to provide tasks via SAP Task Center. You can find out how to set up and integrate cloud products to SAP Start here:

SAP Build Work Zone

Joule is now also generally available for SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition:

SAP Build Work Zone now allows you to integrate web UIs based on HTML5 from other SAP BTP subaccounts. This is done by creating an HTML5 business solution that acts as a content provider in the subaccount.

  • This business solution can be accessed not only by the local subaccount but also by remote subaccounts through destinations.
  • To set up an HTML5 business solution as a content provider, the provider subaccount needs to adjust the HTML5 code to include a cdm.json file, which defines the design-time business content such as roles, groups, spaces, and pages, along with destinations. Find out more here:

In my blog post from February 2024, I explained that SAP Build Work Zone allows customers to define guided experiences, i.e. wizards, to guide users step-by-step through complex processes.

A major enhancement in the October 2024 release is the ability to model guided processes directly in SAP Build Process Automation, bringing powerful process automation to your SAP Build projects. Get an overview here:

Just recently, a new wizard setting was added to allow the execution of the same wizard multiple times. This setting is available both in freestyle wizards and in wizards that are based on a Guided Process from SAP Build Process Automation. For example, an admin can enable this option on the Purchase Order wizard, and this will allow users to run this wizard multiple times to purchase different items.

Enhanced Page Builder Experience across SAP Build Work Zone:

The SAP Build Work Zone page builder experience has been significantly enhanced with new features. Users can now enjoy a widget context menu, the ability to move sections up and down, and a section configuration menu, as shown in Figure 4. Additionally, the option to show or hide section headers and various accessibility improvements make the editor more user-friendly and versatile.

Figure 4: SAP Build Work Zone enhanced page builder experience. ALT Text: the image shows a section of the Work Zone screen with a visual editor. The section is partitioned into three sub-sections, each with a button “Add Widget”, the rightmost one shows an open context menu for the button, which shows that you can also add a column. The leftmost section contains a simple list of items, the middle one a bar chart for Project Cloud Revenue, the rightmost a donut chart for Open SAP Incidents.Figure 4: SAP Build Work Zone enhanced page builder experience. ALT Text: the image shows a section of the Work Zone screen with a visual editor. The section is partitioned into three sub-sections, each with a button “Add Widget”, the rightmost one shows an open context menu for the button, which shows that you can also add a column. The leftmost section contains a simple list of items, the middle one a bar chart for Project Cloud Revenue, the rightmost a donut chart for Open SAP Incidents.

Here is the guide with recommendations and further details:

SAP Task Center

Users can conveniently access tasks from many different systems in one place – not only from SAP products, we also provide APIs for integrating tasks from 3rd-party products.

Even more conveniently, users can now be notified of new tasks via e-mail. Also, end user notifications can now be enabled if you are using SAP Build Work Zone, advanced edition as central point of entry for accessing your business applications.

SAP Build Work Zone itself can also be set up as a task provider for SAP Task Center. This means that tasks created by SAP Build Work Zone will also appear in SAP Task Center.

Furthermore, SAP Task Center now allows users to forward approvals.

New Intelligent Recommendations Feature Available for SAP Build Process Automation Tasks

We are introducing AI to expedite task processing: intelligent recommendations leverage artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate task approval processes. They assist users in making decisions by analyzing key attributes relevant to specific business cases and generating a confidence level in percent for their tasks. Figure 5 shows some approvals with a confidence level of 100%, and some with 97.5%.

Figure 5: New Intelligent Recommendations feature in SAP Task Center. ALT Text: An image of the task center list of tasks, with a filter bar at the top with seven fields available, and the field “Task Type” set to “Manager Approval”. The list shows six entries. The new column “Confidence Level” is highlighted, and shows 100% for the first four entries, and 97.5% for the last two.Figure 5: New Intelligent Recommendations feature in SAP Task Center. ALT Text: An image of the task center list of tasks, with a filter bar at the top with seven fields available, and the field “Task Type” set to “Manager Approval”. The list shows six entries. The new column “Confidence Level” is highlighted, and shows 100% for the first four entries, and 97.5% for the last two.

Find out more here:

SAP Mobile Start

Beyond providing Joule natively for mobile devices, SAP Mobile Start has recently introduced a number of user experience improvements with their 2.0 and 2.1 releases. Here, I would like to highlight the support for ‘new site experience’, giving users a more structured view of applications and information.

Figure 6: SAP Mobile Start with Spaces & Pages from new site experience. ALT Text: Two images of mobile phones. On the left the Apps page, which contains “My Apps Space” showing a list of three page names “Customer Management Page”, “Project management page” and “App Page”. On the right, the App Page is shown, with a list of six apps as cards, with an icon on the left of the app name. The first three (My Inbox, Monitor Situations, Manage My Timesheet) have coloured KPI values displayed on the right.Figure 6: SAP Mobile Start with Spaces & Pages from new site experience. ALT Text: Two images of mobile phones. On the left the Apps page, which contains “My Apps Space” showing a list of three page names “Customer Management Page”, “Project management page” and “App Page”. On the right, the App Page is shown, with a list of six apps as cards, with an icon on the left of the app name. The first three (My Inbox, Monitor Situations, Manage My Timesheet) have coloured KPI values displayed on the right.

A further significant enhancement is the support of declarative UI integration cards, which are displayed embedded in the respective pages on the Apps screen.

Figure 7: SAP Mobile Start supports UI integration cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. ALT Text: Two mobile phone images. On the left Project Apps, which shows a flat card for Project Factsheet and below that a UI integration card showing overall status for active projects, with a list of five projects along with their overall status – four on track, one with “high risk” in red; at the bottom of the card a “See all” button. On the right two further UI integration cards are shown: a list of top 4 projects, and “Cost to Date – Timeline” containing a KPI number for the actual cost to date and below that a line chart of actual and planned cost per month.Figure 7: SAP Mobile Start supports UI integration cards from SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition. ALT Text: Two mobile phone images. On the left Project Apps, which shows a flat card for Project Factsheet and below that a UI integration card showing overall status for active projects, with a list of five projects along with their overall status – four on track, one with “high risk” in red; at the bottom of the card a “See all” button. On the right two further UI integration cards are shown: a list of top 4 projects, and “Cost to Date – Timeline” containing a KPI number for the actual cost to date and below that a line chart of actual and planned cost per month.

For a good and satisfying user experience, being able to personalize the UI so that it fits with how you like to work is a key element. To this end, SAP Mobile Start has now introduced personalization of the start page, allowing you to rearrange the order of sections as well as hiding sections which you don’t need – take a look at it in Figure 8.

Figure 8: SAP Mobile Start personalization of the start screen. ALT Text: Four mobile phone images. On the left the start page, with the sections Insights and News visible. Next, an image of the edit screen, with five sections listed: Latest To-Dos, Favorites, Insights, App Suggestions (deselected), News. Next, an image of the five sections, all selected, now with Favorites first and Latest To-Dos second. On the right, the start page with the sections Favorites at the top (containing flat cards for apps), below that Latest To-Dos (containing larger cards for ToDos, one shocing a purchase requisition with Total Amount $799.99).Figure 8: SAP Mobile Start personalization of the start screen. ALT Text: Four mobile phone images. On the left the start page, with the sections Insights and News visible. Next, an image of the edit screen, with five sections listed: Latest To-Dos, Favorites, Insights, App Suggestions (deselected), News. Next, an image of the five sections, all selected, now with Favorites first and Latest To-Dos second. On the right, the start page with the sections Favorites at the top (containing flat cards for apps), below that Latest To-Dos (containing larger cards for ToDos, one shocing a purchase requisition with Total Amount $799.99).

To find out more about recent innovations as well as what is planned in our road map, have a look at:

Continue Reading…

I hope you enjoyed this first part, covering cross-product UX services. Part 2 is now available:

I will post part three in the next few days, covering a large number of UX innovations in SAP SuccessFactors.

Do keep posting your experiences and recommendations yourself in the SAP Community, with the SAP Fiori and/or the User Experience tag! In case you are wondering how to get a list of the most recent blog posts on SAP Fiori and User Experience in our new SAP Community, use these links:

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