Why Inclusive Research Is the New Gold Standard

Designing with people, rather than for people, is at the heart of our UX transformation

A modern, fresh, bright design with friendly vibrant colors that help people get their work done faster and with more delight than ever before: This is what users can expect from the new Horizon visual theme of the SAP Fiori design system. To ensure that this experience rings true for as many different users as possible, we’ve employed inclusive research practices that leverage a more qualitative approach to stress test our design.

Below we’ll cover four takeaways from inclusive research for the next evolution of SAP Fiori: Building trust, a participatory approach, key research findings, and scaling inclusive practices.

​1. Building trust and confidence is important

The first step to inclusive research is recruiting a diverse range of participants. To do this, we sought out test users who self-identify as being low vision, having color perception differences, and as being neurodiverse for this inclusive research study. In the upcoming months, we will continue to expand our selection criteria to include participants from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds, technological proficiency levels, and additional disabilities.

A core part of our planning process was making time to connect with the participants we were involving in the research prior to the actual session. These pre-sessions helped us get to know participants and reframe their involvement as collaborators. The pre-sessions also helped us customize the session to meet the individual needs, which in turn reduces stress on both sides.

Here are some key steps to building trust with research participants:

1. Start by introducing yourself with your camera on and explain what to expect during the research session. This is a great time to share the research plan, goals, and process.
2. Next, ask the participant about their working setup and if they use assistive technology like screen magnifiers, or accessibility features like high contrast modes. Remember to always respect their privacy and not ask for details about their health that are not absolutely necessary to the research. Be aware of the difference between empathy and sympathy for their disability or circumstances.
3. Hold the session in your participants’ preferred language and at a time that suits their daily routine. During the session, speak clearly and give them as much time as needed when orientating and navigating with assistive technology or adaptive strategies. Offer breaks and follow-up sessions if time runs short.

2. Participatory research needs to be inclusive

Our goal at SAP Design is to improve the user experience of Horizon’s core components including input fields, search fields, buttons, icons, and use of color. Participatory research breaks the linearity of conventional research, allowing us to conduct research with people rather than on people to evaluate the usability and perceived usefulness of all components.

The participatory research sessions were run remotely in a small group: One note-taker, one moderator, and sometimes a few product owners, project managers, or designers. We began the sessions by having the participants explore a prototype of the SAP Fiori app called My Leave Requests while encouraging them to share their reactions to the designs and frankly speaking their mind. Then, to get more of their point of view, we drew their attention to specific details regarding expectations, feelings, and observations. Despite the loose structure, we recommend using a moderator guide as a cheat sheet for key questions.

Following this explorative phase, we then focused in on core components. Asking open questions gives participants the opportunity to answer freely, without limiting or influencing them with predefined answers. Afterwards, the participants were asked to explore a prototype of the SAP Concur Travel app in the same way, also showcasing the Horizon visual theme. Moreover, both prototypes offered the option to switch between old and new themes, which made comparison easy.

3. Inclusive research leads to more nuanced findings

Overall, most of our participants clearly preferred the new design over the current SAP Fiori theme, citing that the new design felt “clean and easy to use”. For example, the new design uses SAP’s proprietary typeface 72, which is optimized for screen consumption. Thanks to the sans-serif font, the number “1” and the lower case “l” versus the capital “I” are easier to distinguish. Participants felt the type was easy to read and appreciated the bold title fonts to show clearer separation between header and body text.

This prototype of the My Leave Requests app shows how bold typography contrasts table and column headers as well as the number of days from less important text in the table. While bold text emphasizes important information, it also creates a contemporary look and feel.

In other cases, we found that the inclusive research provided more subtle insights on certain functions, like the blue outline which indicates the active states for dropdown menus, text fields, and input fields. It was interesting to see that participants from the inclusive research found it more consistently useful while navigating the prototype whereas some customer participants did not even notice the outlines or simply expected these effects.

Here, the prototype for the My Leave Requests app exemplifies the blue outline for active states, for example for selecting the leave type. Participants described them as really standing out and helpful to see such information in the field.

We observed similar responses across testing groups regarding the default hover state of dropdown menus, text fields, and input fields of the Horizon visual theme. Inclusive participants found the hover states helpful to signal what they could do while non-disabled test users often didn’t notice them without prompting. In our upcoming research, we will continue to test how the hover state impacts and affects users with long term use and if it should get visually strengthened.

In these two screenshots of the prototype for the My Leave Requests app you can see that the hover-state effect inverts the grey color of the parent navigation item of the dropdown menu to white and adds a shadow underneath it. Giving it a sense of depth, it seems like the parent navigation item is floating above the page.

However, not all of our initial findings from the inclusive research for the next evolution of SAP Fiori matched up with other forms of customer research, or even our own expectations. For example, some participants who identify as low vision or neurodiverse felt the interface needed more visible gridlines. In comparison, earlier customer research showed a clear preference for less visible gridlines. This provides an initial challenge to understand how we can reconcile these inputs and how to find the best solution for all.

4. Qualitative research is a good start, but we need to go further

Overall, the participatory approach resulted in very natural participant feedback on how to further improve the user experience of the Horizon visual theme. However, the next step of transitioning to more quantitative research for validation needs careful preparation. Participants thoroughly enjoyed the sessions, and many expressed their wish for further collaboration and a high interest in results. Still, it might be difficult to recruit in large numbers. Consequently, any quantitative UX key performance indicator would come with a larger margin of error. Further, many standard UX questionnaires can be difficult to answer for some groups because they only address generic usability issues. Here, a combination of a UX-Lite questionnaire and open text questions are a good option.

Finally, pushing our inclusive research agenda forward ensures fulfilling our promise to enable all people to do their best work with SAP, and if it also brings valuable learnings to the greater (SAP) design community — we’re glad to share!

For more information about user research, see our collective roundup. To learn more about our new strategy at SAP Design, have a look at The Experience Mindset — Redesigning How We Build Products at SAP and at the Horizon preview for SAP Cloud customers starting with the 2111 release.

For how SAP is transforming user experience through inclusive design, you may also have a look at Beyond Checklists: Growing Our Inclusive Experience Mindset.