One Year Strong – SAP User Research Panel Redefines Innovation

⇨ The SAP User Research Panel enhances product development by incorporating direct user feedback through interviews, surveys, and usability tests, allowing for co-creation between users and product teams.

⇨ User research is essential for SAP to understand end-user needs and challenges, ensuring the design-led development process results in high-quality and user-friendly products.

⇨ Participating in the SAP User Research Panel offers end-users a targeted, convenient, and efficient way to influence product design, ultimately improving their own experience with SAP solutions.

Continuous transformation demands continuous innovation. And continuous innovation means refining products and solutions to meet user needs and requirements.

One year ago, SAP launched the SAP User Research Panel in November 2023, a user research initiative that invites end-users to participate in remote research activities, share their product and design experiences, and helps shape SAP products to better align with their needs, while also offering them a preview of new features or products. Today, the panel is not only driving user feedback on SAP products, it is also actively influencing user experiences.

As Ina Pruegel, Panel Program Lead for the SAP User Research Panel emphasizes, “Our journey with the panel has been very rewarding. We had great feedback from customers and product users how much they appreciate that SAP is actively listening to their needs and working towards shaping user experiences together.”

Why User Research?

User feedback is one of the pivotal ways that SAP ensures high-quality products, solutions, and experiences. While SAP’s design-led development (DLD) process guarantees a consistent design and optimal user experience, a core step of this process centers on “discovering” the end-users needs, tasks, and challenges. Through understanding the business roles, tasks, challenges, and activity flows, organizations can clearly identify what users need and how to address them in the most efficient way. Thus, the insights gathered from user research are transformed into product design.

Fueling Product Development – SAP User Research Panel

Through the SAP User Research Panel, SAP brings customer feedback into product development through one-on-one interviews, surveys, and usability tests. The panel enables co-creation between SAP end-users and product teams to enhance current and future products together.

As Tracy McGoldrick, Research Foundations Director says, “Joining the SAP User Research Panel gives our product users a direct line to our product teams, allowing them to have their voices heard and provide valuable feedback on the products they use every day. By participating in user research studies, we are able to listen and act on their suggestions for improving functionality and enhancing the overall user experience.”

Case in point is a research study conducted on SAP Build Process Automations to evaluate a new governance tool for IT administrators. It will allow them to configure the risk level of projects, helping them to become more efficient in the governance of process automation. While testing the new feature and validating most of its concepts they also discovered a few pain points. These insights are crucial moving forward.

Diana Lobanova, SAP Researcher for SAP Build Process Automations, values the high quality of research results when working with the SAP User Research Panel: “Based on their information provided during registration, end-users are only invited to research activities that match their profile and are relevant for them. Thus, end-users recruited via the panel have been perfect research participants, able to share rich details and deep dives on the topics we wanted to discuss.”

For end-users, research activities via the SAP User Research Panel are:

Targeted
Participants will only receive invitations to research sessions that matches their profile.

Convenient and flexible
Registration is unbinding, and research sessions take place remotely at the convenience of the participant.

Efficient and transparent
Research activities typically take 10 minutes to 1 hour.

Satisfying
Product user research will help make SAP products even better than they are now.

The SAP User Research Panel has been introduced to the SAP community at  SAP events across the globe, here in Hamburg, Germany.

Be a Part of the Initiative

By joining the SAP User Research Panel and taking part in research studies, participants can share feedback directly with SAP product teams. This input informs product planning, design, and development, resulting in user-friendly and effective products. In turn, SAP can create experiences that boost user productivity and help product teams better understand user needs and expectations.

Make your voice heard! Join the SAP User Research Panel.

To learn more about how you and your products can benefit from user research, have a look at our recent blog about the new Outage Experience in SAP for Me.