SAP Service Insights

The Power of Prototyping with SAP Fiori

Published: 21/December/2024

Reading time: 3 mins

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Key Takeaways

⇨ SAP Fiori enhances user experience by providing a consistent, touch-enabled interface for business applications across devices, ensuring role-based access tailored to specific user needs.

⇨ Prototyping with SAP Fiori significantly improves cost and time efficiency by allowing for early identification of design issues, thereby minimising costly rework and fostering collaboration across cross-functional teams.

⇨ Engaging users early in the prototyping phase enhances user adoption, as their feedback and involvement create a sense of ownership and alignment with the final application.

The capabilities to create business apps, customise apps with SAP S/4HANA integration, consistent user experience, and seamless transitions between SAP systems – this is why SAP launched SAP Fiori. SAP Fiori is the design language that offers consistent and enhanced user experiences to enterprise applications. SAP Fiori provides a touch-enabled interface and allows users to access business information on multiple devices—including smartphones and tablets. SAP Fiori offers simple, easy to use interfaces, and offers role-based access to applications that address the specific needs of user roles.

Prototyping with SAP Fiori offers a robust foundation for creating user-centric applications while optimising development processes. As Theodorus van Wyk, Practice Partner Technical, SAP Practice at DXC Technology states, “Prototyping with SAP Fiori accelerates value delivery, streamlines collaboration, and fosters user adoption by enabling early identification of design issues, reducing development costs, and ensuring a consistent, user-centered experience across SAP applications.”

User-Centric Design: Prototyping places users at the heart of the design process, ensuring applications meet their needs and expectations. Early user involvement allows teams to gather valuable feedback, fine-tune designs, and address usability challenges before development begins.

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Cost and Time Efficiency: Identifying design issues during the prototyping phase significantly reduces the need for costly rework. Interactive tools like Figma allow rapid iteration on prototypes, saving time compared to rewriting code. This streamlined process minimises resource expenditure and accelerates project timelines.

Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams: Prototypes act as a shared visual reference for cross-functional teams, including UX designers, developers, business analysts, and stakeholders. This alignment fosters better communication, ensuring all parties have a clear understanding of project goals and user requirements.

Iterative Refinement: The iterative nature of prototyping enables continuous improvement. Teams can test and refine designs based on user feedback, ensuring the final solution is polished and meets expectations.

Improved User Adoption: Engaging end-users early with interactive prototypes ensures the solution aligns with their expectations and requirements. This involvement fosters a sense of ownership and increases the likelihood of adoption. When users feel heard and included, they are more likely to embrace the final application.

Tools for Prototyping with SAP Fiori

SAP Build enables teams to create interactive, high-fidelity prototypes that simulate real-world applications using realistic data. Its drag-and-drop interface simplifies design, allowing even non-technical users to contribute. Integrated with SAP Fiori standards, the tool ensures consistent, user-friendly designs. By incorporating real data and facilitating collaborative testing, SAP Build accelerates development, reduces ambiguity, and ensures prototypes align closely with user and business needs. Additionally, Figma, with its Fiori Stencils, also helps designers create detailed and accurate prototypes.

Effective prototyping with SAP Fiori

Best practices in design and development go beyond following a set of predefined steps and they focus on building a strong foundation that promotes collaboration and innovation. By establishing a well-defined design operations process rooted in the principles of Design Thinking, teams can create a cohesive framework where all stakeholders—end users, business analysts, designers, developers, and product owners—are aligned. As Van Wyk states, “This alignment ensures that each phase, particularly prototyping, transforms ideas into actionable, user-centric solutions.”

Using Figma for design and user playback sessions is highly effective because of the capability to create high-fidelity prototypes that closely resemble the final applications. With the SAP Fiori UI Kit tailored specifically for Figma and fully aligned with SAP’s design guidelines, teams can prototype rapidly and confidently, ensuring consistency with the eventual product.

Van Wyk emphasises, “Adopting a “fail fast” approach by diving into prototyping immediately after mapping user journeys is equally crucial. By the third iteration of a prototype, teams often gain a comprehensive understanding of user stories, ensuring that the design flows seamlessly. The act of prototyping itself serves as a vital step in refining and solidifying user stories, making it an indispensable part of the design and development process.”

DXC Technology services enable enterprises to enhance agility, accelerate time to market, reduce costs, and improve customer experiences while driving innovation and growth through rapid development of cloud-native applications, APIs, and microservices. DXC integrates Lean-Agile and DevOps principles into its comprehensive software engineering processes.

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