Using Design Led Development for Hackathons
I am excited to be writing about a tool that not only I use for customers, but many design led professionals use to quickly design, prototype, analyse feedback for their design thinking workshops. I have previously written about the importance of design led development (article can be found here) and how we reduce the total cost of development. In this article, I'll write about how you can use build.me to design your application, provide feedback and publish for others to supply feedback. We used this tool at #Zesfest, more information about the Hackathon and what was involved can be found in my colleagues James Veale's blog. Let's take this process step by step to ensure you can access the right tools and services to build your fist concept
Step 1. Applying for a Free SAP Cloud Platform trial account.
A lot of customers and partners do no realise that we offer an unlimited trial SAP Cloud Platform account that anyone can use. You can use any service at no cost, as long as it is not being used in a productive environment. To subscribe to the environment, head over to https://cloudplatform.sap.com/try.html.
Step 2. Enable the Build and Theming service.
Although there are many great services you could use during a Hackathon, we're keeping it simple and enabling only the build and theming service. You can quickly view these services by selecting user experience in the trial cockpit (Figure 1).
Figure 1: SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit services
Once you have enabled these services, you can head to build.me and start building your prototype. Make sure you watch the video on the home page since it gives you a quick overview of the tool and how to use it.
Step 3. Building your first prototype in build.me
When you first sign in, you have the option to create a new project, or clone an app from the gallery. To keep it simple, let's start with a gallery app. The app I have selected to clone is Connected Goods since this is a product that combines great user experience with IoT to deliver real-time product information for our customers (Redbull uses this solution to monitor approximately 30,000 coolers to identify spillage). Once you select the project, you can clone the project where it creates a copy in your environment (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The cloned Connected Goods project, names as Zespri Connected Goods
You can open the project, review how the pages are connected. However, this is a default page with default theming, we want to tailor the product so it aligns with Zespri's design principles and theming.
Step 4. Design your theme
As demonstrated in Figure 1, there is a UI theme designer tool that you can select. Simply open the designer and start adjusting the colours (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The cloned Connected Goods project, names as Zespri Connected Goods
Once you have adjusted your theme, you can apply your theme to the current build project by selecting the theme icon in the toolbar (Figure 4). On occasion, the theme builder and the build.me project are out of sync regarding the UI5 version they are using. If that is the case, no problem, in the theme builder, simply select the UI version that the build project is currently supporting (a pop-up should tell you the version if there is an issue applying your theme).
Figure 4: Applying a customised theme using the controls.
Now that you have applied your theme, you can modify or change the data based on the data you have.
Step 5. Configure your data
Final step here is to configure your data which is fairly easy, you can chose to edit the default data or import an excel spreadsheet to edit the data. Simply select the control and it will give you the ability to edit the data as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Adjusting your build.me data
This is a subset of what you can achieve using build. There are other features such as creating a study to validate your design with your customer, creating persona's for all the people interacting with your solution and much more. There is a learning page for anyone who is interested in learning more and please feel free to contact me if you'd like to see any functionality or require any more assistance. I'd like to thank the team at Zespri, the team at Datacom for inviting us to participate. A big thanks to Nick Watson for pulling the team together and James Veale for supporting us with his agri knowledge. A final thanks to my manager Saj Kumar for supporting innovation engagements in our region. Next blog will be on the ever growing topic of #Blockchain.