Reprint of article from April 2014 issue of SAP Insider Magazine. The article discusses how individual, role-based screens allow people to get more done in less time with SAP Screen Personas.

1. User Experience
FEATURESTORY
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The consumerization of IT has changed the way
people view technology in the office. Not only
do people want to bring their own devices and
attach them to the corporate network, they want
business software to work as easily as what they
use at home works.
Consumer-focused companies such as Amazon
and Facebook, and the hundreds of thousands of
mobile apps available, have defined the standard
for usability. They don’t come with instructions
— you look at them and know what to do. This is
now what people expect from all software. Unfor-
tunately, most companies have not been able to
meet this expectation.
In many industries, products follow a predict-
able evolution path. Customers first look for basic
functionality; whichever vendor has the most fea-
tures wins. When all suppliers meet this require-
ment, the next battleground is reliability, and
then price.
Enterprise software, which is a relatively
mature market, has already gone through these
phases. Now, the race is on to see who can deliver
the most desirable usability.
The Cost of Poor Usability
Poor usability causes a variety of problems for
organizations, including:
■■ Low productivity. If you can reduce the num-
ber of steps a person needs to go through to
complete a transaction or business process, you
will make them more productive.
Drive Productivity Through
Personalization with
SAP Screen Personas
Individualized, Role-Based Screens Allow People to Get More Done in Less Time
by Peter Spielvogel, SAP
■■ Poor adoption of enterprise software. If
software is hard to use, people will find other
ways to do their jobs that bypass the systems
of record.
■■ High training costs. If software is intuitive,
you do not need any training. Consider that
most mobile applications do not come with
user manuals.
■■ Uncertain data quality. If people are confused
about what data to enter in which field, it is
more likely that they will make mistakes in
their day-to-day online activities.
■■ Excessive employee frustration. Fighting
with software on a daily basis can certainly
lead to increased job dissatisfaction.
While there have always been ways to improve
software usability, they generally required highly
skilled and expensive experts in computer pro-
gramming, database management, or back-end
system integration.
But the challenge that many organizations
face is that in the realm of enterprise software,
there is no one-size-fits-all solution; each business
has unique needs based on its industry, products,
and processes.
Companies should now take part in a user
experience renovation process that focuses on
the fact that different roles use information in
different ways. A salesperson and a shipping clerk
may both need to access the data related to a
sale, but they each want to see different fields to
perform their job functions.
Peter Spielvogel (peter.
spielvogel@sap.com)
is Senior Director of Product
Marketing for SAP Imagineer-
ing, the team that created
SAP Screen Personas. He
works with SAP customers
to explore disruptive
technologies across cloud
computing, mobility, big
data, and user experience.
Peter has more than 20 years
of experience in marketing,
product management, sales,
and software development.
This article appeared in the Apr n May n Jun 2014 issue
of SAPinsider (www.SAPinsiderOnline.com) and appears
here with permission from the publisher,WIS Publishing.

2. Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.
The first step in a user experience renovation
process, as with any IT project, is to identify
people’s needs. Using a design thinking approach
works best for this, as it allows people to fol-
low a structured method to balance desirability,
feasibility, and viability to reach an innovative
solution (see Figure 1). Steve Jobs captured the
essence of this in his address at Apple’s World-
wide Developers Conference in 1997: “You’ve got
to start with the customer experience and work
backwards to the technology.”1
Once you have a goal, it’s time to take the next
step in the user experience renovation process.
Personalized, Easy-to-Use Screens
SAP has recently introduced a fast and easy way
to modify screens that is accessible to both IT
managers and line-of-business users. SAP Screen
Personas allows you to quickly and easily simplify
SAP GUI screens to align the transaction with
specific user roles. Every person in an organiza-
tion can see the specific information they need
to perform their role effectively and efficiently.
SAP Screen Personas lets you personalize the
screen for each user so he or she can be more
focused and avoid visual distraction. Because it is
so easy to use, it reduces the time and cost of per-
sonalizing SAP screens and cuts the ramp-up time
that new users require to come up to speed on
SAP software.
SAP Screen Personas provides access to SAP
systems through a browser, eliminating the
requirement to install SAP GUI on every desktop
system. While this capability has been available
1
See www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE.
through the web GUI, what makes SAP Screen
Personas unique is that it allows editing of indi-
vidual screens (subject to proper security and
authorization rules) to simplify them.
The solution also gives you granular control
over every item on the screen. You can hide fields
you don’t use, move elements around to fit your
workflow,change colors,and add your own graph-
ics.You can simplify complex screens through pre-
filled fields and pull-down menus, saving time on
data entry.You can merge tabs together to stream-
line workflows and automate keystrokes using a
powerful macro engine. Best of all, most controls
are drag and drop. Even scripting is as simple as
recording your keystrokes and attaching them to
a button.
Scripting allows you to streamline transac-
tions and execute dozens of actions with a sin-
gle click. You can even bring information from
several transactions onto a single screen.
Customers can increase employee productivity
FIGURE 1  A design thinking
approach helps bring experts
together to focus on improving
the user experience
SAP Screen Personas lets you
personalize the screen for
each user so he or she can be
more focused and avoid visual
distraction. It reduces the time
and cost of personalizing SAP
screens and cuts the ramp-up
time that new users require.

3. Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.
by creating dedicated screens for each role that
contain the specific information they need for
their transaction — nothing extra and nothing
missing (see Figure 2).
Because SAP Screen Personas is built into the
foundation of SAP software, it installs quickly,
leverages existing security settings, and follows
the standard transport process to bring new
screens into the production environment.
The Many Benefits of Simpler Screens
SAP Screen Personas allows customers to make
their screens more intuitive, improving the user
experience. With a simplified user experience,
companies have been able to:
■■ Boost call center productivity by 233%.
A manufacturing company used SAP Screen
Personas to simplify screens for its call center
staff. Now, operators enter all information on
a single screen (transaction IW51 in SAP ERP),
rather than multiple screens and tabs. This
allowed them to reduce the time it takes to
create a notification; each person now handles
20 calls per hour, up from six. In addition to
the productivity improvement, the company
also saves money on training.
■■ Simplify the sales quotation process from
eight screens to two. The sales reps for a
medical technology company use transactions
VA21, VA22, and VA23 in SAP ERP to generate
quotes for their highly configurable systems
that include hardware, software, and regional
preferences. Before SAP Screen Personas,
they were frustrated by the number of clicks
required to get this done. Now, using a stream-
lined process that they built using SAP Screen
Personas, they were able to reduce the number
of screens from eight to two.
■■ Increase user efficiency by up to 500%. An
entertainment technology company wanted to
provide quick and intuitive access to the most
commonly used transactions, simplify the user
interface, and eliminate non-value-added data
entry. The company used SAP Screen Personas
to reduce the steps required for one of its most
common transactions from approximately 30
to only five.
Learn More
Customers now have the power to simplify
SAP screens to drive productivity through
personalization. SAP Screen Personas provides
a fast, easy, and cost-effective way to deliver
the right information to the right person at the
right time.
For more information about SAP Screen
Personas, visit www.sapscreenpersonas.com.
Or, join the conversation at http://scn.sap.com/
community/gui. n
FIGURE 2 u SAP Screen Personas
allows customers to increase
productivity by easily modifying
screens based on roles and
responsibilities; this example
replaces SAP GUI for a
technology company that
uses it across several locations
SAP Screen Personas
has improved
customers’ user
experience, allowing
them to boost call
center productivity,
reduce the number
of screens used in
the sales quotation
process, and increase
user efficiency.