Redesigning process modeling for efficiency and adoption ⸺

UX

Redesign

User Testing

SUS +20

Problem Statement: Our target users — business professionals and citizen developers — struggled with process modeling in our tool. It was complex, error-prone, and required guessing steps instead of being guided, making adoption difficult.

Business Needs: High support ticket volumes showed that users were struggling with the existing tool. To reduce support costs and remain competitive, we needed a simpler, more intuitive modeling experience that lowered the learning curve and improved usability.

My Role: Alongside a colleague, I led UX strategy and facilitation across design, product, and engineering. Guided research, prototyping, and validation that delivered a SUS improvement of +20 points.

Timeline: 8 months

Why can’t the tool just guide me through the process instead of making me guess?

Discovery Phase ⸺

Testing: As part of our commitment to continuously improving the product, the research team conducted a live user study of the main user journey.

Findings: This evaluation revealed 10 critical usability themes, including:

  1. A confusing overview and difficulty modeling processes.
  2. Misunderstanding error icons as delete actions.
  3. Ambiguous terminology, specially in the adding menu.

Impact. These findings directly informed the redesign strategy, enabling the team to prioritize improvements that would have the greatest impact with the available team capacity.

Step-Adding Workflow in the Original Interface

Step-adding workflow in the original interface

Figuring it Out ⸺

Workshop: We facilitated workshops with designers, developers, and product managers to co-create solutions. Together, we mapped challenges, tested early user flows, and explored different solutions.

Key Outcomes:

  1. Identified critical usability gaps in existing flows
  2. Prioritized improvements to modeling experience and guidance
  3. Aligned teams on a shared direction
  4. Laid the groundwork for low-fidelity mockups for validation.

A team member pointing at a whiteboard with a ruler. The whiteboard has lots of hand-drawn sketches of interfaces
Low fidelity mockups of the new process editor

Evaluative Research ⸺

Testing: We conducted comprehensive testing to validate the new design. Initial studies involved participants with no prior product knowledge, recruited via Respondent, followed by live system testing with Beta customers, large clients unfamiliar with the updates, and partners at an SAP event.

Findings:

  1. Users rated the new design as a major upgrade.
  2. Terminology was seen as more intuitive.
  3. Usability was rated much higher than before.

Quotes from happy participants and partners, such as 'When can we have it?'

Results and Next Steps ⸺

Metrics: The redesign delivered a measurable impact on usability and user satisfaction:

  1. SUS Score: 62 → 86 (+24)
  2. NPS: –11 → +33 (+44)
  3. Fewer support tickets, smoother onboarding.

Next Steps: To ensure continuous improvement, we launched an in-product survey to capture real-time customer feedback and integrated analytics to track usage patterns and uncover opportunities. Upcoming releases will deliver incremental updates based on these insights, further refining the product to align with evolving customer needs.

Learnings: This project demonstrated the importance of early cross-team alignment, which accelerated decision-making and reduced downstream rework. It also highlighted the importance of prioritizing and action on feedback, since it creates a reliable foundation for product improvement.

The new interface.

Credits

Workshop Participants: Diego Ferrin, Robin Kiwitt, Vasileios Xanthopoulus, Jonas Placzek, Hicham Naoufal, Vidyashree Basavaraju, Matthias Stegmüller, Marcin Jedrzejczak

UX work in collaboration with: Diego Ferrin

Research Team: Giannis Georgios Misiakos, Holger Deist

Disclaimer: All images shown use mock data.

Back to


Home

Next Project


Collaborating Across Teams to Integrate SAP Companion