SAP User experience: Is your SAP system usable?
As SAP-run organizations continue to plan, prepare, and migrate to S/4HANA in the coming years, there are two particular challenges that most of these companies are facing; system usability & huge gaps in end-user experience. How can a company scale how usable their SAP system is? How can companies efficiently determine where their user experience gaps are?
The move to S/4HANA provides an opportunity to unlock & leverage Fiori to drastically improve the SAP end-user experience, but before diving into out-of-the-box or custom Fiori applications to improve UX, it’s imperative that organizations first determine where in the SAP system these gaps exist. Mindset Consulting highly recommends organizations utilize a simple, cheap, and very effective tool to do this; the System Usability Scale (SUS).
John Brooke invented the System Usability Scale in 1986. Its use is widespread. The SUS can be used to evaluate different types of websites & systems and is highly effective when evaluating SAP usability. The SUS has plenty of advantages over other usability tests. However, the SUS is cheap to administer. Further, this short quiz is easy to email to end-users. It’s much quicker because the SUS template already exists. Additionally, you could send the SUS template to your end-users today. Depending on turnaround, you could have your usability score in a week or 2. Further, the SUS continues to provide precise, accurate, and dependable results in a shorter period of time than that of other usability tests.
To obtain the usability score, users answer 10 questions on a scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”. We determine the range of 100 score from these answers. A score of 51 or less is considered a failure & shows there is a serious need for improvement. A score of 68 is average. However, a score of 80 or higher is very good.
You’ve distributed the template & you’ve calculated your usability score. What’s next?
Organizations can use their score to better prioritize UX needs; the lowest scores will indicate the highest needs. You can use the SUS to evaluate the impact of new development on usability. Prior to building new applications, the SUS has use to determine the current state of usability. After go-live, when the users have time to kick the tires on their new applications, you may measure the SUS again. This is to provide an objective way of demonstrating impact.
In conclusion, the SUS is an inexpensive, quick, and accurate way to evaluate the usability of an organization’s SAP system. Mindset Consulting offers the opportunity to assist your organization in distributing the 10 question quiz to end-users, provide a report of your organization’s usability needs, and offer targeted UX/usability recommendations at no upfront cost. Please reach out to me at molly@mindsetconsulting.com if you’d like to partner with Mindset to calculate your organization’s usability score!
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