User-Driven + Product-Driven Growth = Business Success

⇨ Product development is an ongoing cycle centered on user satisfaction, functionality, and user-friendliness, requiring a design-led approach that incorporates user research and feedback.

⇨ SAP’s user-driven strategies highlight the importance of aligning product design and functionality with end-user needs, exemplified by the improvements made in SAP Concur’s NextGenUI based on extensive user feedback.

⇨ The SAP User Research Panel facilitates direct input from end-users to product teams, enhancing the development process and ensuring that products remain relevant and effective in meeting user expectations.

Product development is not only about optimizing products or gaining a competitive advantage but is also an ongoing cycle that focuses on user satisfaction, functionality, and user-friendliness. While this offers an opportunity for growth, it also means that product teams need to adopt a design-led development process which involves user research for delivering exceptional experiences whether internally for employees or externally for customers.

To this end, responding to the user needs by incorporating their feedback and insights into designing and building products is crucial. This process is driving many companies to adopt product-focused strategies and enable user-driven growth. Additionally, the shift toward data and data-driven insights means teams are taking a more comprehensive, data-based approach to customer experience and product delivery.

Customers and end-users at the center of product improvement

Design-led development forms a core part of SAP’s process: ensuring product requirements are derived from user research, translated into product design according to guidelines, and properly implemented into our offerings. For example, SAP Concur’s NextGenUI is the outcome of extensive user feedback, data-driven insights, and testing. The updated user inface is now easier to use, more efficient, and more accessible.

Via user feedback, the SAP Concur team was able to see a strong desire from end-users to minimize time spent on tasks and to simplify the onboarding process for new users. The changes implemented now make a real difference for customers. The process also prompted improvements around the attendee functionality within the Concur Expense module and to the search function. Now, end-users can simply enter either a name or email address as an identifier. These changes were driven by insights gathered from case studies and live feedback from participants at events such as SAP Concur Fusion.

To involve customers and end-users even more conveniently, SAP has designed the SAP User Research Panel. By participating in remote user research studies, end-users can share their opinions, suggestions, and concerns directly with product teams. This ultimately helps to create user experiences that are closely aligned with their needs. James Hogben, Customer Success Manager at SAP Concur, highlights: “Initiatives like the SAP User Research Panel help to scale and make it easy to connect end-users to our teams. This delivers value from having the right end-users for the right researcher or designer at each moment. If you are a user of any SAP solution today and you feel strongly about how it should be used or could be improved, then you are someone who should take part in this panel.”

To actively influence your user experiences for both unreleased and existing solutions, follow these three steps:

3. Register: Your information allows us to align you with relevant research studies.
4. Wait: We’ll send an invite via email if a study fits your profile. You decide if you’re interested.
5. Participate: Sessions are held remotely, be heard!

Conclusion

By aligning growth strategies around both the end-user and the product, businesses can attract and retain customers while also refining their products consistently, resulting in lasting growth and competitiveness. At SAP, user research plays a crucial role in supporting product teams to understand users’ needs and expectations to ultimately ensure that products are easy to use, efficient, and effective.

Via the SAP User Research Panel, participants can conveniently take part in research and contribute to the evolution of SAP products. Join now!