SAP

SAP is the #1 corporation focused on software development worldwide. I joined the company in 2021 as a Visual Designer for a Customer Success team dedicated to S/4HANA, one of the most relevant products from the company's portfolio. In 2022, however, I shifted my focus to Product Design within the Product Engineering area. Since then, I have supported the CX organization to improve their end-to-end experiences for the Commerce Cloud solutions.

The problem

SAP has an extensive cloud portfolio that includes more than 100 different solutions. As a User Experience Designer for the company, my main challenge is to resolve or improve inconsistencies and unnecessary complexities in products caused by legacy issues. To do so, collaborating efficiently with the Product and Development teams according to an Experience-Led Development mindset is the best way to ensure delightful and seamless end-to-end experiences.

The process

The value of having a centralized repository of design principles, recommendations, patterns, and assets is unquestionable. However, in a company with a diverse portfolio like SAP, the Fiori Design System may not cover all possible use cases from every Product Engineering organization. To address this consistency gap, I took the initiative to collect and document patterns that were either specific to our CX Commerce Cloud solutions or not sufficiently specified by Fiori.

As time passed, our UX Design Lead suggested I collaborate with two other colleagues to create and structure our Commerce Best Practices & Floorplans Figma file, combining our specific guidelines with floorplan components and A11y Annotations. Leading this initiative helped me understand better the SAP's UI frameworks and their programming model layers, which, in turn, allowed me to work more efficiently with UI and Backend Developers.

The solution

The CX Commerce Cloud comprises several solutions for product recommendations, intelligent merchandising, content management, adaptive search, payment frameworks, product management, etc. To understand how these different products work together, I had the opportunity to split my capacity and resources into all six Commerce Design Domains over the past years.

Given the diversity of projects and my commitment to the SAP compliance requirements, I decided not to focus on singular deliverables here. Instead, I want to showcase how my work has become more methodic and structured since I joined the company. After all, it is more relevant for me to demonstrate how my contributions positively impacted different stakeholders than how I tackled a specific demand or product.

For example, besides the day-to-day new features, tickets, quality audits, and tasks related to the Product Management and Development teams, I regularly participate in Vision ideations, AI Hackathons, and Design Jams. In today's fast-paced and competitive technological realms, I must constantly challenge myself to be more creative and innovative, even in corporate and conservative environments.

The outcome

Thanks to this mindset, I could learn from and connect with dozens of Design, Product, and Development teams in Europe, Asia, and North America. This agile and diverse collaboration required me to foster hard and soft skills that directed me to become an essential contributor to our most challenging MCS Extensibility products today.

Besides, the Commerce Best Practices and Floorplans strategic work I initiated has evolved and yielded several positive outcomes for my team. We now collaborate closely with the CX UX Leadership, User Assistance, and Core Design teams through a bottom-up and cross-organizational approach considered inspirational by other teams. However, the most significant benefit of this initiative has been the upskilling of our designers, which helped us to comply with all SAP UX-Cs requirements by last year.

In addition, I want to highlight my accomplishment as the UX Designer of the regional winning team in the Commerce and Consumer Industries Hack-AI-Thon 2024. The competition had 280 participants in 40 teams from over ten countries. Our Proof of Concept focused on sustainability and recycling economy, as by combining image recognition, large language models, and prompt engineering, we aimed to increase the percentage of recycled materials worldwide.

Finally, joining SAP helped me realize that 1) adopting the ELD process allowed me to better support my organization in persuing its VTKs and overall company strategy; 2) systematizing my design practice via the Best Practices & Floorplans initiative enabled me to become more confident while ensuring more useful, usable, and valuable products; and 3) although authenticity and friendliness may get misunderstood in specific environments, I am not willing to compromise.

MAIN TEAM

I&CX UX Design Manager: Kathrin Hamburger
Commerce UX Design Lead: Jeanne Walters
Commerce Extensibility Design Owner: Guilherme Haupenthal
Commerce Floorplans & Best Practices Core Team: Dominika Zamojska, Dominik Oelfin and Rebeca Guedes