Simplifying the Modeling Experience ⸺

UX

User Testing

2023

1 year

Problem Statement: Citizen Developers, who possess extensive business knowledge but limited coding experience, struggle with process modeling due to a confusing interface, unclear terminology, and unintuitive workflows. These challenges hinder productivity, lead to frustration, and reduce tool adoption, ultimately impacting user retention.

Following an extensive user study of the product's main user journey, we identified numerous usability issues and opportunities for improvement, setting a clear goal to enhance the modeling experience.

Business Needs: The project aimed to align design efforts with key business goals, including improving user retention rates by enhancing the onboarding experience and addressing usability gaps. Additionally, the initiative sought to lower support ticket volumes, reducing operational costs by tackling areas of frequent escalations, which in this case was the Process Builder.

My Role: As UX lead alongside a colleague, I drove the redesign initiative, collaborating with UX colleagues, product managers, developers, and researchers to ensure its success.

Timeline: 8 months

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. Participants recruited via Respondent represented our target Citizen Developer persona, ensuring relevant and actionable insights.

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: The UX team, developers, and product managers convened for a 3-day workshop in Berlin to address key usability issues. Together, we analyzed findings, prioritized usability themes based on user impact, and co-created actionable solutions to improve the modeling experience. We conducted follow-up workshops for each prioritized theme to gather expert feedback from the broader team.

Mockups: Post-workshop, the UX team developed low-fidelity mockups to validate solutions with internal stakeholders. The designs emphasized a guided modeling experience to streamline task completion, improved adding menu discoverability and scalability, and workflows designed to reduce errors and enhance user comprehension through natural language.

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: Using high-fidelity prototypes, 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. This iterative approach ensured diverse perspectives and actionable insights.

Results: The studies highlighted significant improvements, with SUS and NPS scores increasing by 20 points. Participants praised the usability enhancements and alignment with the new Fiori Horizon theming and SAP brand identity, strengthening the product’s value proposition for customers.

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

Results and Next Steps ⸺

New Designs: The updated concept introduces a default vertical view alongside the classic horizontal layout, optimizing the canvas for better content visibility and usability. The revised block layout improves clarity by reducing tangled lines and nodes, while the addition of natural language and a guided modeling experience simplifies workflows and meets the needs of our target audience.

Next Steps: To ensure continuous improvement, we’ve launched an in-product survey to collect real-time customer feedback and are integrating analytics into the product to monitor usage patterns and identify new opportunities for enhancement. Upcoming releases will include incremental updates based on user insights, further refining the product to align with evolving needs.

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.

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