Helping businesses gain insight on their data through voice, and discover content across their organization.

A Dive Into BI and Infrastructure Design

I previously worked on SAP Analytics Cloud, as a user experience designer. Analytics Cloud provides end-to-end analytics for business, helping them make decisions through their data through visual dashboards. This product combines BI, planning, predictive, augmented analytics, and machine learning capabilities through the cloud.

My Role

Even though I was an intern, I had full-time responsibilities. These were my main roles:

• Led the voice UX integration into the mobile app, a top customer request, working with product experts and engineers to increase customer satisfaction and the mobile use case value
• Released 3 features to customers and designed 4 product visions in an Agile environment, being responsible for prototyping, research, and testing concepts
• Participated in customer presentations, using feedback to help inform future product directions to project higher NPS scores

Through the 16 month internship, I had the opportunity to explore different areas of the product.

Overview

During the first half of my internship, I worked on our Platform team - designing infrastructure topics focused on helping administrators and content consumption for users.

On the second half, I focused on designing tools for augmented BI, helping customers consume and visualize their data and dashboards more effectively. I can’t show any screens for this work, due to NDA, but the BI topics I worked on are scheduled to be released in 2021.

I also worked on our mobile application, designing features to allow users to gain more insights on entities related to their business needs. My work was focused on Search To Insight – designing conversational artificial intelligence technology with natural language.

Here's a snapshot of what I worked on, showcasing some released product features.

"Voice To Insight"

For mobile, one of the main features I worked on was a voice ux feature - bringing voice support to Search to Insight. Using natural language processing, I helped to further the mobile use case of gaining insight on users analytical questions.

With voice input, this allows users to gain business insights through voice. Voice was the next step, bringing more functionality to a "chat-like" business feature.

Overview

With Search to Insight, this challenge was unique, because we had to consider an interaction method where entity selection requires a manual input. This is because business models can be complex, and users need to be able to precisely choose the correct model. But we also had to balance showing the most popular result.

The result was a workflow that could be integrated directly into the text-based Search to Insight feature. We would return the most popular entity result, but also allow for the familiar interaction of entity selection, built into the behaviour of voice.

This addition was showcased in the Quarterly highlight video for Q1 of 2021. Please feel free to watch it in action!

You can learn more about this in the release notes here, along with a blog post.

The work above is the current release as of 2021, and future scope specs are under NDA.

Analytics Catalog

One of the main projects on Platform was working on Analytics Catalog. This project was focused on discovering content. My role here was to help craft the initial UX from the initial design stage. The product offering was then released to customers in Q1 2020.

Overview:

Before Catalog, people would organize files in a repository - most likely breaking down by line of business. But the repository can grow, making it more difficult to discover content.

As an example, think about your Documents folder with probably multiple files, and you're trying to find one specific file tucked away in an obscure folder. Might not be so easy?

The solution was a guided browsing experience, with enhanced metadata and custom filters. By having a central place to discover content, there’s no need to show folders, but rather have everything in a single view, with content curated for each user based on their permissions.

I worked with other designers on the team for this project, along with the development team. I was involved from the initial design process and vision, to testing development builds before customer release. You can read more about the project in SAP's blog post here, along with the release notes.

Takeaways

This was truly an incredible internship experience. As an intern, I was empowered by having designing features that would actually be released to paying customers. Here are my main taekaways:

1. Communicate Not Just The Design, But The Value of The Design:
   Design is all about communication, and learning to scope out designs has helped me gain a clearer idea of how to implement right in a timely manner, while seeing the complete vision. The full vision won't be implemented right away, so it's important to communicate the MVP and the most important aspects of the design, for it to have measurable success.
2. Gaining Confidence:
   Having the confidence to pivot a design, be able to take initiative for the design, and speak up for the vision to deliver the best experience for customers. Interns get independence, but with that comes responsibility. Being accountable to your PMs, engineers, and fellow designers are skills I am thankful that I was able to develop while working at SAP.

I want to say a huge thank you to my mentors: Salathiel, Vince, Brianna, Lauren, Joelle, and Brett for empowering me throughout this internship.

All other work and future scope of projects showcased here is under an NDA, but I would be happy to discuss my experience and takeaways from this internship in-person or at an interview.