Overview
SAP is the world's largest business software company, with over 47,000 employees in more than 50 countries worldwide. The Vancouver User Experience team at BusinessObjects is involved with numerous development initiatives.
Goals
- Enhance the User Experience team’s ability to address interaction design issues.
- Provide user experience consultation for original "Mobile Business Intelligence" product.
- Help facilitate remote user studies and usability testing.
- Introduce project collaboration tools and techniques.
- Communicate the value of User-Centered Design (UCD) across departments.
- Provide strategic usability consultation to senior management at the Vancouver office.
Paul's Role
Paul was invited to provide training and consultation for the User Experience team, senior management, and contribute to the design of a mobile business intelligence application.
Challenges
To provide the required expertise and resources apace with project timelines.
Approach
- Educational seminars and design coaching.
- Ad-hoc interface design feedback.
- Worked with Product Management to define user requirements, initial workflow and user interface designs (Blackberry and Windows Mobile), and usability testing of initial paper-based prototypes for original "Mobile Business Intelligence" product.
- Instruction in usability-at-a-distance tools and techniques.
- A project extranet was set up to facilitate discussions, file sharing, and project status snapshots, for use both in and out of the local office.
- Company-wide presentation and webinars highlighting the business value of the on-going user experience design efforts within the company.
Results
Providing a range of services in an ongoing engagement, Paul helped the SAP BusinessObjects team use remote usability testing and usability evaluations to produce design solutions for issues across multiple projects. In doing so, Paul strengthened not only the individual products, but as well the capabilities of the team he worked with. Paul also provided an extensive set of annotated wireframe user interface specifications to help guide the further evolution of the mobile business intelligence product.