Building Portal Sites
Providing business users a modern and intuitive user experience is a key priority for many organizations today.
Hello, my name is Dominic Fernandez and I will try and give you a comprehensive overview about creating and managing your portal projects in the cloud using the SAP Cloud Platform Portal service.
I will introduce you to the fundamentals of user experience and SAP Cloud Platform Portal. I will elaborate on the importance of the user experience in today's digital world.
As the world becomes more digital, businesses are also changing. We recognize an increasing speed of innovation and transformation across industries. To master these challenges of the digital age and stay ahead of their competition, enterprises build new alliances to collaborate and gain access to expert knowledge.
Organizations also see an increasing demand by customers, partners, and suppliers to work closer together, and enable real-time information on order status, inventory, or required maintenance. Imagine:
- Increasing the productivity of your employees and managers by establishing a central point of access to all apps and self-services via a launchpad.
- A comprehensive HR portal offering access to documents and information.
- A marketing/support website for your customers that contains product information, documentation, a knowledge base, and even an option to open a ticket in case of incidents.
Let's start with the essentials. As the world has become increasingly digital, user expectations have shifted too. The way we consume information, watch movies, talk, shop, play, and so on.
Chief executives have recognized that providing their customers a great experience is no longer a nice-to-have, but essential now-a-days. It is a key differentiator in your sales. User experience covers much more than what you just see on a screen or advertisement. It goes beyond the pure user interface, meaning, the visual design and layout. It covers the overall experience, how a user engages and interacts with your company and your solutions in particular. This can be for a product, service, or even your website.
Consumer-style apps are loved and being used every day by the younger mobile users - because they are so intuitive and easy to use. It is so natural for them, and they expect the same from business software.
For example, having instant access to any kind of information and services. Furthermore, users do not want to do a training course or study long manuals to understand how your product is working. Unfortunately, the reality looks somehow complicated. Well, here comes the challenge for most organizations. Modernizing and digitizing business processes is not trivial at all. Especially, when you would like to connect employees, customers or partners across value chains. Business users expect intuitive and easy access, anywhere and anytime. Obviously, this can hardly be achieved with traditional software solutions. Indeed, the reality is quite different.
Classic, desktop-oriented interfaces make it very difficult to find the right information quickly. UserInterfaces (UIs) are usually very complex and not ready for mobile consumption. User interfaces are often very rigid or static, and offer only limited personalization capabilities. All in all, this leads to poor adoption and only moderate user productivity. As a consequence, companies spend a lot of time and efforts for keeping their legacy solutions up and running.
And the support team is busy with serving plenty of user requests via the help desk. All this leaves only limited time for innovation.
How can organizations modernize their business processes – that is ideally delivered with an enjoyable user experience out of the box?
SAP helps organizations to master their digital transformation and differentiate themselves from the competition by rethinking their business processes and interaction channels. This doesn't stop with a nice, mobile-ready app.
People expect great experiences in every interaction. Putting the user at the center of any technology project and delivering an exceptional experience, can be a true catalyst for transformation.
What exactly is digital experience? Digital experiences are any interactions, that a person has with an organization through digital touch-points. Today that means via smartphone or desktop, but this is quickly evolving to include voice, conversation, and intelligent agents.
People prefer engaging channels such as web, mobile, social media, and collaboration. They really want highly personalized experiences. They want information that is relevant to their individual needs. They need easy access to all the information, services, and tools. These interactions need to be very intuitive and come with a minimal learning curve.
Thus the question: Why should you put emphasis on designing a really good user experience?
On the one hand, there are monetary benefits. You can easily increase the user productivity because employees or colleagues get the tasks done very efficiently. An easy-to-understand and intuitive interface also reduces the need for training or offering major support via help desks. Furthermore, users make fewer errors when using user-friendly software, which also leads to higher data quality in your systems of records.
Non-monetary benefits are equally important. Especially, when you are engaging not just with your employees, but also with external customers and partners. Imagine how higher user satisfaction leads to better adoption and increases the loyalty of your customers.
As you can see, you may easily build a business case for user experience (UX). And the business results will justify your investments. When running UX modernization projects, putting the user into the center is extremely important.
How can you achieve this? At SAP a UX-driven innovation life-cycle, with the phases Discover, Design, and Deliver is used. This approach, combined with methodologies like design thinking and agile development, proved to be very successful.
Start with an intensive research about the persona and their needs, tasks, and goals. Then, in the design phase, this input his highly valuable in order to create the first low and high-fidelity mock-ups for iterative prototyping. Along the way, your designers and developers will fine-tune the design and start implementing.
This is where the real coding happens. As soon as the final application is ready to go, you deploy it and make it available to your end users. Now, the more business applications and services you offer, the higher the need for a central entry point. Just think of all the back-end systems, databases, and information repositories in your organization. And additional cloud solutions are approaching quickly.
So, how can you bring them all together under a central, unified experience? The answer is portals. Portals have evolved from static link lists and application launchers to really smart, digital workplaces which can be easily customized and personalized to the user's needs. They provide an intuitive and role-based single point of access to a variety of resources, information, and self-services in your organization, whether it is on a desktop or mobile device.
With the technologies available today, portals become even more dynamic, intelligent and context-aware. They proactively notify and assist the user to get their tasks done very efficiently. That's why portals play a major role in user experience.
SAP recognized the need for a simplified user experience in business software. With SAP Fiori, modern design principles across the solution portfolio. Besides role-based applications, SAP offers the SAP Fiori launchpad as a central entry point.
To Summarize:
- An enjoyable and intuitive user experience is essential in the digital era to engage with and empower your users.
- Understanding the user's need and investing in user experience can help to increase the overall adoption and productivity of your workforce.
- A modern digital workplace aims at intelligently supporting users to get their job done very efficiently.
- With SAP Fiori, SAP offers a modern UX design for business software out of the box.
Would love to enable your Portals with enjoyable and intuitive user experience ... I am just a few clicks away ... < Contact Me >
Dominic Fernandez? ... defining, designing and delivering solutions to help businesses achieve results - efficiently and effectively!