SAP Splash

SAP Splash – empowering business experts to design awesome apps

In the enterprise world, companies are starting to become aware that user experience is a strategic differentiator. With the popularity of well-designed mobile and online experiences, there’s an expectation for intuitive and beautiful design even from business apps. Users now expect the same experience from their organization’s travel app that they receive from the likes of airbnb.

The ideal designer-developer ratio is a 1:10. At SAP, we are 1:100. With our customers, it’s not uncommon to see about 1:5000. This yields a large design talent gap of 5 million designers in the SAP landscape alone.

With this ratio, this design role usually lands in the hands of the business experts or IT specialists. Although experts in their domain, they are novices in human centered design. This mismatch results in inefficient functioning and crude looking business apps, which is a far cry from the airbnb experience.

SAP Splash helps bridge this huge unmet need in user experience for enterprise apps. Business experts can go through a guided design process that involves byte-sized learning pieces, with relatable examples and templates. Simple tools can be used to create interactive prototypes with realistic sample data. In turn, more accurate user feedback supports to jumpstart their development process. Business experts not only get to build UIs that are inline with today’s best practices, but also gracefully ease into the discipline of user centered-design. When this process is duplicated, thoughtful design begins to scale in organizations.

SAP Splash shares our years of accumulated knowledge on good enterprise application design. We took a lot of time to fine-tune how we deliver our learning. Through research and testing, we found users wanted to spend time in the tool but not be overwhelmed with large amounts of learning material. This key insight led us to establish the design principle of learning by doing. Our lightweight design method cards present easy to digest learning chunks with concrete business examples. This allows our users to do a little and learn a little, and this key piece is our big differentiator.

SAP Splash is addressing design at the UI level while also giving our users an understanding of how to deliver a better experience.

SAP is the first software vendor empowering business analysts, developers and IT team within organizations to think like designers and deliver user centered solutions. We can now all imagine a world where dull enterprise software is as easy to use as consumer products, is simple, is delightful, and is mindful.