Fiori Practitioners Forum May 2020

Fiori Practitioners Forum Overview

Since the pandemic, it’s fair to say that we have all had to adapt and evolve to keep businesses going. It’s precisely scenarios like this that lead to innovation and demonstrate the power of design thinking and how it can keep companies running through uncertainty. This has led to a shift to remote design thinking and innovation. Join Bluestonex CEO- Dan Barton as he discusses the impacts of remote design thinking and how to transform these changes into assets at the Fiori Practitioners Forum.

The future of working

In recent years, we have had to adjust our way of thinking and working. Because of tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom we can continue in the new normal. It’s our CEO’s belief that the shift to remote/ hybrid working will still and we will never go back to fully in the office. In a lot of ways it’s never been about being in the office- its about working smarter and design thinking is one of the ways we can do that.

Design thinking for remote working.

We have written about what design thinking is in another blog here but relating it to COVID we have had to adapt the process slightly. On-site at Bluestonex, we have a Usability Lab, which we make use of as much as possible for body language and interaction of users with clients. Naturally, Covid meant we had to close the office and the Lab became unusable.

A guide to remote design thinking workshops

Remote design thinking is fast becoming a staple of working life. Here are our tips on how we have adapted to get the most out of working from home:

• Preparation is key. Plan out activities beforehand.
• It’s also important to make sure people test the technology beforehand, e.g.- by checking audio and video on Teams.
• When using video, make use of the blur feature to appear a little more professional- you never know who could pop up in the background.
• Facilitation skills- give everyone their chance to speak by coordinating discussions.
• Use empathy- because you’re using human-centred design- it’s in the methodology!
• Makes sure actions and next steps are clear.
• Keep sessions short, concise and timed.

Remote design thinking sessions also require the right tools. Here are our top picks:

• Mural has been great for collaboration and brainstorming. Think and collaborate visually anytime, anywhere.
• Microsoft Teams is great and can be integrated to Mural- other video conferencing is available.
• Survey Monkey can capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to the design.
• Sometimes, to be creative the best way is to spend a few minutes sketching ideas and low-fidelity prototypes- so any sketching or paint tool.
• SAP BUILD is still great for cloud-based tools to design and build your enterprise app.
• Photoshop is what we use for creating high-fidelity prototypes.
• Another great prototyping tool created for designers, by designers is Invision.

Our view for the Cloud

The Partner Managed Cloud

We felt that things were too complex for customers so we decided to launch our UX in the Cloud. Skill required for UX are not readily available as you think and can be expensive. It’s been around for a while but essentially, we have started a gateway in the Cloud with pre-packaged content (both standard Fiori and Custom Fiori and Slipstream/Screen personas Fiori Apps). The PMC is a monthly subscription including the initial setup. You choose from a list of apps from our catalogue, if it’s not there we can deploy it or even build it for you.

Our approach to using PMC for remote design thinking.

The goal here was to work as smartly as possible. To do this, we used the Partner Managed Cloud to build applications in the cloud and utilise the single point of entry to streamline the UX for the team.

We used the Cloud to keep our core clean, removing dependency on peripheral databases and file systems. Consequently, we could get the most from our data, as it’s a best-in-class cloud DB as a service. This allowed us to eliminate Excel and paper-based systems, keeping workflows streamlined and productive.