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OVERVIEW
Re-thinking mobile Business Intelligence system on Android.
A B2B solution to empower business decision-makers to get important actionable insights.
This solution could empower by making efficient use of one / combination of SAP offerings along with newer technology.
With the existing app MoBI, A small team consisting of a product manager and my design manager at the time wanted to look at the application with a fresh pair of eyes.
The focus was supposed to be more on exploring ways to consume data, than representing data itself (charts, etc).
To me, I took up the opportunity to know such a vast domain. It worked out pretty well, as I always had invested team members for feedback & open to new thoughts.
MY ROLE
Being my internship project, I was responsible to understand the domain and come up with a tangible proposal with an approach that could redefine the way the existing app works.
Key responsibilities included
The Secondary & Primary research
Heuristics evaluating the existing application,
Design proposal
NID graduation project at SAP Labs.
PRODUCT PLATFORM
Android Mobile
DURATION
June 2017 – December 2017
TOOLS
Sketch
Craft
Invision
Final Result
Design proposal.
CHALLENGE
"To explore ways of data consumption on mobile."
This re-design was an exercise in staying true to the product yet trying to improve the user experience.
This re-design project was a big challenge given the unknown domain. One thing that I focused on while I studied was to constantly try to imagine my user. To get an idea of their needs.
Considering the vast domain & re-design challenge this big, I also took the liberty of designing with material guidelines which I was familiar with.
DISCOVER
When I started the project the process was very linear. I started with secondary research to get familiar with the domain. At later stages where I could synthesize my findings, I started with sketching ideas while continuing my design process.
Presenting these ideas would get me more questions and would go forward with finding answers to them and sketched some more.
Secondary Research
What is Business Intelligence on Mobile?
Mobile business intelligence (BI) is the ability to access BI-related data such as KPIs, business metrics, and dashboards on mobile devices.
What do users look at?
Usage statistics?
-Reports
-Explore
As we see report consumption & analysis tops the chart which gave me a clear understanding of the usage of contents.
-Monitoring
-Ad hoc Analysis
-Predictive analysis
This Gartner shows features that are most used. Which gave me insights into the scope of improvement for SAP analytics on mobile.
SAP BI offerings studied
Primary Research
I wanted to talk to as many customers as possible who then used SAP analytics on mobile.
It became quite difficult to get time. So, then I Interacted with Terry Panner, Product Marketing Manager for SAP analytics cloud platform who focuses on Digital Boardroom, Mobile, product roadmap, and working directly on go-live projects with specific customers.
I had prepared a questionnaire as a part of the discussion to identify gaps, pain points and consolidate customer’s points of view.
Interaction with Terry Panner was very helpful in not only getting answers to the questions I had but I also gained his point of view who understand their frustrations
*Research links are available upon request.
Customers in highlight
Sephora
Deliver daily sales reporting to warehouse managers and executives. Reports include sales by department, flash sales, inventory, peer stores, and YOY performance.
“The last thing we look at before we go to bed and the first thing we look at when we wake up”
SAP sports analytics
This particular customer makes use of real-time data i.e during the game which is like 8-10 times in a year. Analysis from Comparison of data points is the biggest trigger here to interact or to take actions.
Use case:
During the event, it is extremely important to have real-time consolidated data to make informed decisions like ticketing, parking, food & beverages, social sentiment etc.
Gameday management.
Generate management alerts. Ex. A VIP enters the stadium.
Users:
Front office executives, C-suit executives of 49ers
Honda R&D America
This particular consumes data points with respect to the timeline. The sequence of events/tasks is critical and any issues in the sequence are a trigger for actions taken.
They consume data on daily basis on an avg. of once in 3-4 hrs.
Use cases:
Tasks and sub-tasks at a manufacturing unit. Reports related to all kinds of activities are important. Typically Consume data is tabular fashion.
Users:
Department heads, operational managers
Research Insights
Cognizance through connected content
Attention to individual parts of a report in digital silos prevents the user from making connections between the content within among different business reports.
In-depth exploration and scanning through Essentials
Due to the varying schedules of business users, their consumption of reports may vary from details analysis to glancing through reports yet they need to draw insights irrespective of how they view their reports.
Seamless and insightful Collaboration
Feature-rich detailed interaction with the report or chart. This can lead to effective communication when jumping between various platforms in conversation and report analysis.
Security is the key at all times
Security seems to be a concern among users, and rightly so as a lot of reports contain sensitive information. The phone and the application must be aware of the user’s authorization.
5. Self-service BI and Self-reliant User
users expect to be able to have access to cloud day directly so that they can work on parts or whole of report data.
6. Intelligent and timely alerts
With actionable notifications, users can be empowered with effective decision-making even faster.
7. Working with BI even when offline
bringing access offline just when the user needs it BI must provide uninterrupted assistance in all conditions.
8. Instant Knowledge access is important
Advances in AI and NLP can provide an opportunity for them to quickly find what they are looking for in a manner that is natural as well as has questions answered in an instant.
Persona Study
I now had an idea of domain and knowledge of customer base. It was now easier for me to look for my users of these apps. I focused on the finance function to associate with my persona. I categorized these user groups into 3 types of personas. We'll be focusing on Primary & Secondary.
“prime objectives,
Learn about revenue KPI’s
The health of revenue from sales
Geographical statistics of revenue and patterns.”
Focus:
High-level performance, KPI metrics, Quick references to similar situations.
Pain points:
Do not get the insights she requires from the reports. And has to depend on information pushed from her staff which is time talking and filled with anxiety.
The lack of contextual information often reduced her efficiency to make the most out of data.
Difficult to follow-up her questions on various reports and charts.
Sarah
43, Sales head APAC
Simple Shoe Company Pvt. Ltd
“prime objectives,
Learn about revenue from the specific region
Details of all particulars of his region
Status of each product category with respect to every region.”
Focus:
Detail performance, Coordination (the middle guy), work alongside his higher authorities for strategies.
Pain points:
Li does not always find time to explore within a complete report and would prefer knowing where things might or are going wrong, quickly.
Whenever affected by a lack of real-time data analysis, he relies heavily on offline data.
Poorly designed reports often limit digging deeper in his reports, even though the required datasets are available.
Li
38, Sales Executive, China
Simple Shoe Company Pvt. Ltd
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Introspect,
At this point, I studied the existing application MoBI.
The thought was to not refer and study the existing app until now so as to avoid limiting my conceptualization process. Not have biases towards any type of design and not have influence.
I wanted to study the existing application to understand the offering. To converge in my process at a tangible point where the application is serving and then apply my study so far to the existing. Also, the fact that several customers already use it with their business I wondered how else we might relook at it to benefit users.
The application was at its very initial stage with very limited capabilities and needed updated technologies to support businesses today. The use cases of the application were very narrow and needed to be scaled up to make the app useful.
IDEATION
I sat down with sr. members of the project to brainstorm and explore my ideas. Clearly, my ideas were way more futuristic with respect to them considering the gap between my study insights, the existing application, and capabilities SAP could leverage for mobile.
So I later came up with this idea board to explore my concepts further.
SOLUTION
On a broad level, the idea is to make users aware of how AI will empower daily tasks. And allow users to also personalize information to reduce report/data clutter. This AI-driven interface is intended to be a layer on top of the traditional reporting application. Since I identified that the user feels more comfortable when the content structure is available.
There are several workflows that are taken into consideration but for this presentation's sake, I focus on uniques journies such as
Onboarding & set-up journey
Explore journey which makes Analytics Flair stand out.
CONCLUDING NOTES
Overall it was an exciting journey of 6 months from knowing nothing to I'm getting a hang of it now.
Tapping into the emotional aspect of design:
I presented the project to the entire team and received their feedback. One of the best pieces of feedback I received was from Gerrit, SAP's former Executive VP which was "how do we make our customers trust these insights?"
If I look at taking this project forward I'm sure this would be my direction.
Peers are Important:
Good team spirit, collaboration, open critics are very crucial. The numerous sessions with the team to understand the product helped me go ahead much faster.
Thanks for scrolling!
😊
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