Transforming Business Through Design

How we’re creating an informed and intentional design strategy to achieve our user-centric transformation at SAP

Over the last five years, I’ve noticed that organizations looking for large scale transformation tend to choose one of two paths: They either attempt to use marketing and brand to create noise around little to no change; or they invest in Design as a way to create substantial and impactful change. In my experience, those who choose the latter are much more likely to see the longtail wins. Why? Because for legacy enterprises or non-design firms, a solid Design Strategy functions as critical wayfinding through any transformation process.

For SAP, master of many categories, the common thread and the clearest signal for our transformation is the user. In order to ensure our Design Strategy is built in service of our users, we’ve started our journey by defining who the user is, what are our key archetypes, and what problems they require us to solve. By focusing on these questions, we’re able to steer clear from bias while ensuring our design decisions are informed and intentional.

Anatomy of a Design Strategy

Design as a discipline is no longer just about pixels, color, or “making things look good.” Rather, design strategy helps make sense of the larger picture, weaving together inputs rooted in business needs, product vision, user experience, and brand to create a vision for the future and a direction forward. These interconnections and friction points pressure test a design strategy, pushing and pulling until it forms a fluid amalgamation that becomes our North Star.

Leading the newly formed Creative Studio at SAP Design, I’m charged with creating a vision and visual direction for our design strategy. A key to this vision is design research, which allows us to create the best experiences, to build the most memorable visuals, and to grow in the process. As a part of this process at SAP Design, we evaluated our system, our place in the market, our value to users, and our ideal message. SAP has a wealth of history, equity, and exposure. Like many legacy companies, it comes with good and bad, complications and answers, and ultimately, a need for unification. In the end, we understand that we are Building for Humanity.

Expressing product integrity

After 50 years, SAP is still the largest provider of enterprise software worldwide. Our cloud user base alone is over 240 million. This volume is constantly astounding us. Moreover, we have an obligation to this vast audience to provide an experience and functionality that is accessible to all, inclusive in its nature, and flexible enough by design to be transformed for any of our product lines while maintaining core cohesion.

The product expression that unites our evolving design system is defined by these values:

Value 1: Our work is made for people. Users are at the heart of our intention. We must prioritize their needs and pain points when we make design decisions, including visual choices. Our brand expression is intricately tied to our design system. Every expression of the brand must share the same language, intentionality, and purpose, including the visual direction.

Value 2: Inclusive design is an integral part of our process. Building a team that is representative of human diversity in all its forms is the first step in the inclusive design process at SAP Design. Our teams are global, and we are intentional about ensuring that our design groups are not homogenous. Well-designed teams make for good design output. In this way, we can approach each step of the design process from every angle.

Value 3: Our decisions are made based on user experiences and feedback. User testing and design research is crucial to our process. We prompt end users in order to understand their full experiences and gather insights, allowing us to iterate and provide a better overall experience. We interpret qualitative interviewing, co-creation, quantitative data, and survey pulses to build our net new design work at a brand level, and continuous interaction over time to check in on user reactions to aesthetics from an emotional perspective.

Visual direction in the wild

With the intent and values for our strategy set, we’re able to dive into the most tangible part of the design process — the visual direction. The visual world we build for our software extends far beyond the UI on the screen to touchpoints across our digital and physical worlds. The style we’re developing for SAP Design is open and friendly with a focus on bold, layered concepts, vibrant emotional color combinations, and whimsy. The brand expression surrounding the Design System is an extension of this design style. It’s focused on experience, kinetics, non-representational graphics, and can be more arbitrary in its color combinations. For these kinds of product expressions, we created a system that flexes into the future while maintaining a consistency of building blocks. It’s our hope to continuously build and evolve this visual world piece by piece.

Keeping our promise to users

The key to any successful transformation is that it’s never truly finished. This may sound daunting, but it should be freeing! Establishing a foundation for human-centered design processes and methodologies helps companies work toward more continuous innovation and overall resiliency. At SAP, this means testing and iterating on the effectiveness and desirability of the work across all our disciplines. We are continuing to implement psychological research studies, specific SAP users’ feedback, and general brand learnings to inform our decisions and keep evolving our brand and product expression. This is a new team, a new era, and a new take on how SAP thinks about linking the user to the user experience. Through our learnings, empathy, consideration and mindfulness, we intend to keep our promise to users and forge ahead with new creative outputs that help us build for humanity.

As VP of Design at SAP, Halle Kho leads a remote global design team that influences all aspects of product expression for SAP Design. Her practice area expertise includes Experience & Research, Storytelling & Strategy, Creative Direction, and User Experience Strategy & Vision. Halle is a seasoned design leader with a passion for product and brand design. Before joining SAP, she was Head of Design and Executive Design Director in the New York studio of frog, one of the world’s premier design consultancies. In her extensive 30-year career, Halle has gained valuable experience in a wide range of industries, including tech, retail, fashion, e-commerce, healthcare, and social media. Her client work includes product design innovation, design language systems, and user experience for some of the world’s top brands, including Barnes & Nobel, Reebok, Tom Ford, and Florida Blue. Passionate about both craft and mentorship, Halle has served as a guest lecturer at Parsons School of Design and NYU School of Professional Studies.