SAP has long been considered a very clunky system that is difficult to implement and often difficult to learn from an end-user point of view. SAP was built to be all things to all people…the problem is that every company has their own way of doing things (their secret sauce). So that means that often there are a ton of fields on a screen that may not serve any purpose other than to confuse the end-user.
Traditionally the SAP GUI has been a difficult thing to master for most users. But over the last several years SAP has finally invested in the “user experience” with the evolution of SAP Fiori. That’s what’s so exciting about SAP now.
As someone who has been in the SAP space for many years, I truly don’t believe there is anyone who does a better job and is more capable to help customers (our partners) navigate the User Experience better than Mindset. To truly empathize with end-users, we leverage a process called Design Thinking. We have our own take on the Design Thinking process and it is has been proven to be very effective with SAP.
I should probably tell you that I’m the type of person who likes to tinker with things, create things, and get deep in the weeds…the tech space opens the door for people like me. Especially when it comes to building things…like software. It’s kind of started at an early age and continues to this day. Let’s just say that when the new grill or the Ikea furniture is ordered and delivered, I am usually the one called upon to assemble.
To go even deeper I have toyed with different languages before (C, C+, Visual Basic, HTML, etc.) and was part of the Apple developer program. I have served as the webmaster for different projects and volunteer organizations. I even remember doing user research for one particular project on colors and making recommendations based on that research for the end-user experience when a web page was still in its infancy. Gees I’m starting to feel old.
So as part of my role (like all Mindset-ers) to deliver a wonderful customer experience, I decided to get another perspective on Design Thinking, so I enrolled in a Design Thinking course via Coursera. There were quite a few to choose from but after clicking on several links to get an idea of the course content I decided on Design Principles: An Introduction with an Interaction Design Specialization. This course had more of a software UX focus which I felt aligned more with our own process.
I have taken some online courses in the past so I kind of knew what I was looking for. Here are some of the things I used as a general guideline to decide which course to take:
- First, I decided what I wanted to get out of the course. In this case, it was just to audit our Design Thinking process with a competing process.
- I then spent some time exploring and read several course descriptions and even reviewed some of the video content that was available. I found the curriculum of the course I selected aligned more with what I was looking to gain from the course.
- Time was also a factor, so I also looked at the course length as I felt a lengthy course might be one of those things that just never finds its way to completion as I have a lot of competing activities outside of my daily work routine (kids, volunteer activities, coaching, etc.).
- What is the cost? While cost isn’t a huge factor taking it for auditing purposes doesn’t make sense to spend several hundreds of dollars.
- Does it offer a certification? This particular course does but again in this particular case doesn’t really provides any value.
- Finally, how is the access? What platform does it use and is it easily accessible and easy to register? In this case, the course offers a pretty straightforward platform for access and registration.
Stay tuned I will let you know how it goes. After I complete this I plan on learning Python (or at least understand it).
