Prepare
B2B SaaS App Showcasing Memorable Customer Experiences
Designed to compliment the SAP Fiori framework featuring custom components and libraries, the Prepare app achieved its original goal to reduced overheads and continued to evolve in support of users. Offering better tailored results and wider content to assist colleagues in winning customers to SAP It's now an established fundamental stage in the Pre-sales customer journey and the design and usability has achieved much positive feedback from customers and colleagues alike.
Background & Business Objectives
Before its release users requested a software environment directly with their allocated development team. This was beneficial to the requestor but challenging from a repetition and reusability perspective, and over time led to a dramatic increase in workload of our software engineers. The process created development silos which lacked the ability to add further value beyond the original requestor once created. It was a time-consuming process with no viable way to track, share and reuse those experiences which led to similar requests resulting in duplicate effort and overhead. The Prepare Application set out to change this. Understanding our users through qualitative methods, feedback and stakeholder discovery calls I designed and presented modular solutions to assist them during this transitional stage, and the UI was prioritised to move rapidly through a Q&A styled approach in order to maintain momentum with the product, to help minimise any perceived friction during this transition.
Low-friction UI Prioritised for Momentum
Prepare enables users to find software environments and to discover related content to enhance their customer interactions and I designed the product with an open-ended structure allowing room for future expansion. By having the content in a centralised location we would eliminate duplication and increase the capacity of development teams to focus on cases where no suitable or existing matches are present, and a solution can be developed.
Hi Fidelity Prototype Screens for Prepare App
Communicating regularly with the product owner & development engineers I created detailed prototypes demonstrating the personalised shopping experience to visualise each stage of the process: please expand the first and proceed through the lightbox to understand how the application moves the user forwards.
Incorporating Personas
During its third year a substantial development phase was entered to incorporate industries and personas that would benefit our users with further tailored results and content inline with the SAP Intelligent Enterprise. This required a complex change to the existing product to include new modules and to remap existing processes.
The Persona Stage
After consultation I opted for an X/Y approach moving vertically and horizontally across the data. Each row and column becomes highlighted or dimmed when controlled by the filters allowing the user to quickly view the best options to their requirement.
Business Processes
To incorporate personas effectively would require additional data mapping within the business process stage. This was a challenge due to the number of processes and associated display data.
Controlling this new granularity with a combination of toggle switches resulted in the optimum user experience - allowing both persona and industry matches to be viewed with a single user action.
Results
This method and associated colour scheme was retained throughout the application, providing continuity and the results tiles were enhanced to display those matches enabling users to view their most relevant results organised by a percentage score at a glance.