Case study SAP

Far too many of our long-term users are jumping ship and we're not sure why... could you help us?

Product Management
SAP Community

The team at SAP told me that their long established community was loosing members at an alarming rate.
They had some feedback from members, but hadn't implemented any of it.
My task was to validate the feedback, and suggest a fix for the problem.

Challenge

Target audience were/are tech-savvy "geeks"
The belief that "geeks" actually enjoy parsing really complicated screens
Developers had been allowed to design the application for developers
Sprawling content & UI created a huge cognitive load, even for "geeks"

Analysis

Organic & uncontrolled growth of interface
Confusing & unclear UI
Streams of notifications made it extremely difficult to identify & re-find content

Solution

Re-organisation of content
Colours used to identify types of content
Daily changing showcase of content at top of search results
Reduction of UI elements and possibilities on screens
Grouping of thematically related elements
Different filters grouped together

Role

UX Designer
Researcher

+ Interviews

+ Focus Groups

+ Usability Tests

Tools

Paper & Pen
Sketch
InVision

Deliverables

Customer Flows
Wireframes
Layouts
Prototypes

Screens showing the colour-coded pages with various types of content: There were blogs, questions, and coffe-corner discussions.

The homepage has daily changing highlights.

Pulled out by one of SAP's algos

The blog section, in gold, also has its own daily changing highlights.

The SRP for blogs in gold

Blogs have their own daily highlights.

The questions section, in blue, also has daily changing highlights.

The SRP for Q&As in blue

Q&As have their own daily highlights.

The discussions section, in blue-ish green, also has daily changing highlights.

The SRP for discussions in blue-ish green

Off-topic discussions also have daily highlights.

The color-coding becomes apparent, and useful, on the activities page.

Different colours for different content types

The color-coding becomes apparent on the activities page.

A blog detail page uses the gold color

All things blog would use the gold colour.

The thing with communities is that, generally speaking, most businesses offer community facilities (functionalities) so that customers and/or users can transfer knowledge. And that they offer a sense of belonging to members, from beginners through to advanced and very knowledgeable users.
And that implies members uploading content, but also finding & referring to content.

The big issue with SAP's community is that audience consisted of many geeky users, and although I'm no where near as geeky as most of SAP's community members, a few things were clear early on;
#1, The community had a huge worldwide user base and frequent visits (with over 3 million registered users and more than 250k daily visits)
#2, There was a massive amount of user-generated content (i.e. blogs posted at a rate of at least 4 per hour, 24/7, and questions asked at a rate of at least 20 per hour)
#3, A monumental amount of text-heavy content combined with a developer's design & UI made viewing & finding content unnecessarily difficult
#4, Most of the feedback had to do with viewing & finding content

All the members' feedback was studied by myself: I explored how the content was found (searched for), and tested how it was used.
That allowed the identification of four major types of content type, in this order:
#1, Questions - users dive quickly in & out for questions and answers
#2, Blogs - users bring enough time get into a topic & to read a blog
#3, Off-Topic - users are distracted & engage in off-topic discussions
and
#4, Activity Stream - a display showing a mix of 1, 2 and 3 together

The entire community needed to reflect those three major types of content.
That meant they needed to look different, yet they were all predominantly text-heavy & user-generated.
I needed an overview of the community, to see the connections, and to see the customer journey in action.
I roughed up a user-flow on a whiteboard, discussing it within the team. Then digitalized it into the flow you see here.
How do newbies arrive?, how do members arrive?, what do they see?, how are Q&As related to blogs? and all those other questions...

I'm a great fan of colour-coding different things, if it helps differentiate things, all the while asking the question, do things need to be differentiated?
Yet I'm acutely aware of the "Smarties" effect (aka the "M&Ms effect"), where an overuse of color leads to a deterioration in legibility.
Highlight everything and you highlight nothing.
The color-coding for SAP started out as an over-the-top amount. It was then reduced iteratively ("less is more") to just the right amount of highlight, supporting differentiation without getting in the way.

Parallel to all other developments, the filtering needed looking at.
The filtering was literally all over the place... sometimes at the top of the page and sometimes at the side.
I insisted that it needed to be in one place, and of the two obvious places to locate the filtering, the side bar had more room for growth.
Easy-to-use filtering isn't all that easy to conceive.
But I did it... I found the common denominators which allowed very similar filtering, with similar terminology, in the same place on each page.
The filtering for SAP was placed in the right hand side-bar and ran from top to bottom, and had the unique element for each page at the top, with the common elements below.