overview & impact
As a User Experience Researcher, I Conducted UX research activities on SAP products across three main platforms: Cloud, Mobile, and On-Premise. My primary duties included conducting formative usability studies, ethnographic research, and end-user interviews. Post-research duties included organizing and executing research data analysis and synthesis sessions with product teams, and the communication of findings to product stakeholders. I conducted research on many SAP products including SAP CRM solutions, BusinessObjects Intelligence Platform, SAP Mobile Platform and mobile enterprise applications. User research often greatly contributed to minimizing product support costs, increase of end-user satisfaction, and the improvement of the overall user experience of SAP products. Only a few studies are shown below.
 

   Sales & Service On-Demand Study

Designed, proposed, conducted, and reported results of formative usability study for SAP sales and service on-demand application dashboards.

  1. Designed — Met with stakeholders including product managers, developers and designers in order to design a usability study that would address questions and concerns about the latest dashboard designs.
  2. Proposed — Presented a research plan that would validate the available dashboard designs with new and existing end-users.
  3. Conducted — Created a detailed participant recruitment screener and worked with recruitment vendor to select the most qualified participants for the study. Created a moderator test script in consultation with stakeholders. Conducted usability study with 8 test participants from service and sales.
  4. Reported — Presented usability study findings to all stakeholders. The study accomplished the following:
    • Assessed users’ perception of dashboards designs including first impressions
    • Determined users’ navigation expectations and ability to perform relevant tasks
    • Assessed whether users were able to discover and use dashboard functionality
    • Determined users’ content expectations of a personalized dashboard
    • Gathered feedback about the visual design

   Social/Service On-Demand Study

Assessed the overall user experience from participants (customer service agents) by focusing on the product’s top workflows and task.

  1. Designed — : In order to capture appropriate feedback that informed the design team to develop intricate functionality, the following objectives were included in the design of the usability study:
    • Allow participants with more freedom to explore and provide feedback
    • Identify areas that are working well and those that need improvement
    • Gather feedback on terminology and UI elements
    • Gather satisfaction, ease of use, relevancy ratings and count success/fail rates per workflows and tasks
  2. Conducted — Created a detailed participant recruitment screener and worked with recruitment vendor to select the most qualified participants for the study. Created a moderator test script in consultation with stakeholders. Conducted a formative usability study with 6 test participants:
    • One on One structured interviews and task-based usability sessions
    • Tasks were designed to answer research questions with progressive assistance (from the general to the specific) when necessary
    • Participants were not provided training or demos prior to participation
    • Assistance was tracked for each task. Four or more assists constituted a task failure
    • Use of “think-aloud” method was employed
  3. Team Analysis + Synthesis — Analyzed and synthesized findings by clustering and discussing data directly with designers, developers, product managers and other stakeholders who observed the usability sessions.
  4. Reported — Presented detailed usability study findings to all stakeholders. The presentation included the following elements:
    • Summary of product goals and study goals
    • Study details including objectives, user profiles, participants, study sessions, and teams involved
    • Research methodology and study format
    • List of tasks
    • A narrative walkthrough of top findings for intelligibility
    • Ratings for each task in terms of ‘ease-of-use’ and ‘relevancy’

 
 

   Retail Execution Study

Conducted a formative usability study on retail sales representative mobile application.

  1. Designed — Met with stakeholders including product managers, developers and designers and put together a research design with the following measures:
    • Success Rate – Percentage of participants that competed each task
    • Time to completion – Average time to complete ach task
    • Post-task questions – subjective ratings on relevancy, ease-of-use and satisfaction
    • Qualitative observations – Observations on how participants used the retail representative application
    • SUS – System Usability Scale was used to gauge usability and ‘learnability’
  2. Conducted — Created a detailed participant recruitment screener and worked with recruitment vendor to select the most qualified participants for the study. Created a moderator test script in consultation with stakeholders. The script included 8 tasks plus wrap-up questions, SUS questionnaire, and opportunity for final thoughts/feedback. Conducted usability study with 7 meeting the following criteria:
    • Two or more years of experience performing retail execution tasks at store level
    • Conducts store visits and spends at least 60% of their time in stores
    • Have experience using mobile devices (smart phones or tablets)
  3. Reported — Presented usability study findings to stakeholders. Presentation included a summary of top usability issues, positive feedback, SUS results, graphs of success rates and time on task breakdown. Additional report was provided with screenshots of detailed findings and breakdown of all usability issues:

   Service Center Contextual Inquiry

Conducted field research aimed at deepening understanding of the Customer Service Agent role including identifying core tasks, work responsibilities and needs.

  1. Designed — Met with stakeholders including product managers, developers and designers and put together a research design that involved day-long contextual observations of end-users as they performed daily tasks.
  2. Conducted — The research effort required an entire team of observers in order to efficiently capture data from 10 end-users in their place of business. There were three debriefs with the research team that helped consolidate findings throughout the day.
  3. Reported — A “day-in-the-life” composite narrative was developed in order to successfully present research findings to all stakeholders at SAP. Many nuanced issues were uncovered including case workflow problems that involved extra-technological solutions. The presentation included detailed walkthroughs that showcased key findings in relation to usability, implementation, frameworks, and even bugs. Design recommendations were also presented in the final presentation and reports.