SAP is a multinational software corporation, focused on enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations.

Fiori is the UI and UX layer of SAP software, enabling users of SAP products to access consistent and well-crafted interfaces across applications and devices.

Mass Data Analyzer

In 2016, the SAP Connected Goods team reached out to Planetary about attending a UX/UI workshop. Together, we focused on a number of challenges facing SAP customers who rely on large real-time data sets.

Over the course of 3 days, we outlined a new tool for displaying, analyzing, and understanding extremely large data sets: the Mass Data Analyzer

By creating a prototype for a tool that could enable cross-dimensional exploration of large data sets, we were able to get feedback and validation from both engineering and customer-side stakeholders.

In addition to providing a clickable prototype of the Mass Data Analyzer, we put together a number of case studies for review by other SAP teams.

After completing the workshop, we continued to work with a number of stakeholders from SAP to further develop the concept, iterating features where engineering could support them.

Real-time Data Workshop

In 2017, we conducted a second workshop with the Connected Goods team to contextualize the new workflows and tool we had produced. Focusing on a number of customer cases, including Red Bull and Hilte, we produced a number of iterations on Fiori to support the real-time streaming data coming in from connected goods.

One of the primary challenges of this work was understanding and responding to the complex requirements of mapping real-time data on a large scale. Creating a consistent and intuitive language for a large set of disparate devices, while keeping the design accessible and inclusive, required a lot of research and iteration with stakeholders.

Additionally, the design team produced a further iteration on the Mass Data Analyzer, incorporating the suggested mapping language and scaling back the density of the interface.

Our work with SAP is ongoing, and covers a large number of customer and stakeholder needs. Pushing the design language of Fiori forward to meet existing business cases is just one part of the challenge: we hope, in future work, to produce tools and define patterns that can grow along with yet-to-be-discovered challenges.