Build Your Own Fiori App (BYOFA) Workshop - an insiders view...

At the end of September, NTT DATA Business Solutions UK partnered with SAP to create a workshop around User Experience, Fiori and Design Thinking. The Build your Own Fiori Application (BYOFA) workshop challenged different customers from different industries and backgrounds to join Itelligence and SAP for three days of ideation, brainstorming, problem solving and Fiori development.

We had four customers joining us from completely different industry backgrounds, law, education, retail and distribution. The fact that the clients felt there was no direct industry competitors amongst the group, allowed them be more participate fully without the need to withhold any information that could negatively impact the activities of the workshop. This was also a good lesson learned for NTT DATA Business Solutions and SAP.

The workshop was created by us at NTT DATA Business Solutions in partnership with SAP UK with the goal of introducing new and current customers to the design thinking methodology, applied to building a Fiori application. Fiori is the most recent design paradigm of SAP that is taking the SAP landscape UX and design to a whole new level.

Design thinking is the latest buzzword to describe a different approach to solve problems using a user-centred approach using creativity and brainstorming. It can shed new light and ideas into a hard to solve problem where traditional problem solving wouldn’t. In the end, the user is centre piece in the methodology and everyone feels involved in finding solutions to the problem by collaboratively building up ideas and solutions.

The workshop spanned across three days. The first day was mostly about the design thinking methodology, the second day was used to introduce the clients to the recently released SAP collaborative design tool BUILD and the third day was the hands-on realisation phase to build the bespoke Fiori application.

It was suggested to the clients to come up with real problems from their businesses practice. After being introduced to the design thinking methodology by SAP, each group started to work on their “real world” problem.

The customers used SAP BUILD to bring the solution to their proposed problem from ideation to reality. BUILD allowed the users to easily materialize their ideas in an early interactive mock-up and later into a high fidelity Fiori prototype. Another powerful functionality of BUILD is the Create Study tool. This allows users to get early feedback on their designs from the business. Getting real data and indicators to work and improve their solutions is a real game changer to produce a more user-centric design.

The third and final day of the workshop was spent in building the idealized Fiori application using SAP Web IDE. The customers were helped by Itelligence consultants in the whole process, from a brief overview in what is Fiori to OData services. At the end of the day the client groups were all able to materialise their ideas into a working early Fiori concept application.

The gathered customer feedback was excellent and even exceeded our own expectations. The format of the workshop was very well received as well as the content and the outcome. The customers were impressed by the fact that they could design and materialize their ideas into a working prototype Fiori application in just three days.

For Itelligence this was certainly a very good experience and a different way to interact with the customers. We learned a lot, knowledge that we can apply to our everyday practice but also to future workshops.

Author:

Nuno Moco – Senior Mobile Technical Consultant