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Everyone in the SAP community has heard of the SAP Fiori user experience, but their level of understanding about the actual subject varies enormously.
The original SAP Fiori user experience for web apps based on the SAPUI5 framework has considerably evolved since its inception, designed to address customers’ drive for a better user experience of SAP systems. In the early days SAP released some 25 web-based applications to enable users to carry out most common scenario user processes in SAP, such as HR and Finance. At the time this was a brand new and revolutionary way of working, although to the modern digital user of today they were simple and limited.
Customers had been asking for user experience software for years but when SAP Fiori was launched, customers were unhappy about the costs of being asked to pay to an extra licence. Customers felt that they had been paying for service and maintenance for years and as soon as SAP came up with a better user experience it was packaged as a money-making exercise, effectively putting a price tag on usability. As a result take-up remained low in the first year, but SAP responded to the criticism, soon thereafter making it free of charge with its SAP support contracts.
Fiori is a design language
With the availability of increasingly responsive technologies SAP has put a lot of development and design capacity in building many more Fiori apps, hundreds of them. The launch of SAP Fiori 2.0 produced a lot more functionality, and the ability to cover much more business flows.
As the design language that brings great user experiences to enterprise applications, to remain consistent SAP Fiori needed a set of design guidelines which would allow designers to create consistent and coherent SAP Fiori apps.
The concept that SAP wants to convey is that everything a user does in SAP is done via an SAP Fiori app, and that users can create their own apps if they follow the design guidelines. So it doesn’t matter how many new software acquisitions SAP makes, or how many new products are launched, the user experience will always be consistent.
Working across any SAP software and any device …. The arrival of SAP Fiori 3
Users will soon be getting the reimagined face of SAP interface for all lines of business across devices. SAP Fiori 3, due to launch early this year, is designed to enable engaging and intuitive apps that can run on any device, bringing a new vision that understands that modern day users need to navigate seamless across a range of different SAP systems, whether on the latest S/4HANA, C/4HANA or other very different software.
The premise is that customers don’t need to know how different the underlying software is, whether it’s based on SAP UI5 or other web technologies, Android or iOS, as long as they follow the SAP Fiori guidelines, the experience is consistent and consumer-grade.
The future is here to stay
New business partnerships continue to enrich SAP Fiori, such as the one with Apple and Google which enables new native business apps for customers to fully leverage data in their enterprise systems while on the go in a mobile work experience.
And with SAP CoPilot on the radar, providing a humanised user experience for SAP apps by using natural language experience in a digital assistant, SAP is set to increase your productivity and continue to simplify your user interface. I think it’s safe to say that SAP Fiori is the future.
