Businesses know that digitalization can also help them leverage the power of data and connectivity, and come up with completely new insights about the future directions and steps for their businesses. Their goals are simple: make business processes faster, easier, and cheaper, and create software products that their users will use and love. In addition, the expectations of end-users have made the user experience a critical strategic differentiator, even in the world of enterprise software. With the profusion of well-designed mobile and online consumer experiences, there’s a growing expectation for enterprise apps to have beautiful, intuitive design. Users now expect the same delightful experience from their organization’s travel expense app as they get from the likes of uber and airbnb.

However, these businesses aren’t always equipped with all the needed design and development skills or knowledge for this journey. Unsurprisingly, a majority of apps being created take a lot of time and resources, yet fail to resonate with their eventual users because of their inefficient functionalities and crude, unintuitive user interfaces. Forrester Research claims that in the enterprise world, 70% of apps that are deployed are not adopted because they are difficult to use. A far cry from the consumer-grade user experience that people have come to expect everywhere.

With Build, SAP has turned design thinking from an idea, a way of thinking, into a productized solution to help corporations to practice design-led product development and create exactly those delightful and useful apps.

With Build, businesses can:
Create an interactive visualization of the app to bring product ideas to life
Get early feedback from end-users to make edits that mirror their needs
Generate real UI code automatically to jumpstart development

Here is a short video to give you a quick overview of Build: https://vimeo.com/182832619

Build includes a guided design process that leverages step-by-step, bite sized learning pieces, with relatable examples and templates. It offers a simple prototyping tool to either create a low-fidelity interactive prototype or make mock-ups with realistic sample data – without having to write a line of code. Build also enables users to share these prototypes with their colleagues and target users to collect informal feedback, collaborate, and conduct usability studies. Once the prototypes have been validated with end-users and are ready for development, Build generates high-quality and SAP system compliant code to jumpstart the development and implementation phases. Business experts not only get to create UIs that are in line with today’s best practices, they gracefully ease into the discipline of user centered-design.

This cloud-based solution builds on many thousands of hours of research and testing to make nuanced decisions about everything. For example, we found users wanted to learn design fundamentals and right way of building products, but their first priority still remained to create something and get their work done. Large amounts of learning material on Design Thinking or developing products just wasn’t appealing to these users. This key insight led us to establish the design principle of learning by doing. We introduced lightweight design method cards that allow users to learn concepts in small chunks along with concrete business examples. This enables our users to do a little and learn a little, and this key learning feature is our big differentiator. The best part? Our seamless integration of user-centered design principles gets anyone practicing design thinking before they even know it’s called design thinking.