Redesigning process modeling for efficiency and adoption
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. In our initial study, 8 of 9 users needed assistance to complete basic flows, and 8 of 9 didn't know they'd failed. The redesign had to make the product usable before anything else.
My Role: At the time, I was leading the UX team for SAP Build Process Automation, a team of several international designers. This project was the flagship redesign effort. I co-led UX strategy alongside Diego Ferrin, spanning research planning, prototyping, and validation from discovery through release. The work delivered a SUS improvement of +24 points.
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.
Findings: This evaluation revealed 10 critical usability themes, including:
- A confusing overview and difficulty modeling processes.
- Misidentification of error icons as delete actions.
- Ambiguous terminology, especially in the Add menu.
Impact: These findings directly informed the redesign strategy, enabling the team to prioritize improvements that would have the greatest impact given the available team capacity.
Step-adding workflow in the original interface
Ideation and Alignment
The key decision: keep everything in the canvas, or introduce a side panel for step configuration. We went hybrid: flow on the left, full step configuration on the right. The reasoning: complex steps need dedicated space, and the pattern was already familiar from other parts of SAP Build.
Workshops with designers, developers, and product managers helped pressure-test this direction before committing to prototypes.
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:
- Users rated the new design as a major upgrade.
- Terminology was seen as more intuitive.
- Usability was rated much higher than before.
Results and Next Steps
Metrics: The redesign delivered a measurable impact on usability and user satisfaction:
- SUS Score: 62 → 86 (+24, n=14)
- NPS: –11 → +33 (+44, n=14)
- Fewer support tickets, smoother onboarding.
Next Steps: To sustain improvement after launch, we introduced an in-product survey and integrated analytics to track usage patterns. These tools now feed a continuous cycle of incremental updates based on real customer behaviour.
Learnings: The biggest lesson was how much early cross-team alignment compressed our timeline: decisions that might have taken weeks of back-and-forth were made in workshops. It also reinforced that usability testing doesn't have to be perfect to be valuable: even informal sessions at the SAP event surfaced insights that shaped the final release.
Credits
UX work in collaboration with: Diego Ferrin
Research Team: Giannis Georgios Misiakos, Holger Deist
Workshop Participants: Diego Ferrin, Robin Kiwitt, Vasileios Xanthopoulus, Jonas Placzek, Hicham Naoufal, Vidyashree Basavaraju, Matthias Stegmüller, Marcin Jedrzejczak
Disclaimer: All images shown use mock data.
Next project
Cost Estimator Redesign