User Research at SAP – The Resource Library

User research provides an essential foundation for the user experience (UX) of any successful digital transformation: Designing without user research is guesswork. Along with SAP’s user research community both expert knowledge and a demand for upskilling are growing. Thus, this blog provides a structured overview of methodological pieces, expert insights, and success stories. Also, please find answers to the most-searched-for questions about user research.

What is UX research?

There are very few definitions in literature about user research. Mike Kuniavsky (Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, 2003) defines user research as “the process of understanding the impact on an audience” in order to design products that meet customer needs. According to the ISO definition 9241-210:2019, user experience includes “the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, comfort, behaviours, and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.”

In the context of business software, user experience research is a systematic approach to find out how processes, products, and services work in everyday life. Insights about the end users’ needs and expectations help to make informed design decisions and enhance the user experience.

Why do we do user research?

Investing time and money in user research will benefit all parties involved: Product, user and business. Incorporating numerical data and deep knowledge about the end users’ behaviors, needs, and wishes in an early stage of the development process avoids costly adaptations, tweaks, and escalations later on. This goes hand in hand with an improved user experience of the product.

What are types of user research?

User researchers have two main goals: to inform the product direction (new products, innovation) via field and market research, and to continuously improve the usability of products during the design and development phases. If the goal is to create a completely new software solution, user research is typically already starting to take place before a single line of code is written. When conducting user research to enhance existing software, the focus is on uncovering further requirements and improving the user experience.

Then, we can also split user research into qualitative and quantitative user research.  Whereas qualitative research produces descriptive data and focuses on opinions, problems, reasons, and motivations, quantitative research results in numerical data that can be measured and analyzed more easily. The best kind of user research brings both quantitative and qualitative data together to provide product teams with a 360 view of user needs.

What are user research methods?

There are many different methodologies to choose from. Selecting the right method for your research question is critical to uncovering insights. In order to find the research method that fits your project’s current needs, reflect on two questions: Where are you in the product development lifecycle? What kind of information do you actually need once the research project is complete? The graphic below gives an overview of the 14 most practiced user research methods at SAP and their typical placement within the design-led development process.

During the Discover phase, user research focuses on learning about stakeholder and end user requirements, such as their responsibilities, tasks and activities, typical use cases, workflows, and the use of other software and artifacts needed to perform their jobs. In the Design phase, different methods are available for the validation of low- and high-fidelity prototypes. In the Deliver phase, usability benchmarking and surveys help to evaluate the product.

What does user research include?

Any user research project includes planning, preparation, conduction, analysis, and synthesis. The details depend on the selected method. However, there are a few points that will decide whether your user research project will be a hit or miss.

• Goal setting: Before starting any user research project, clear goals needs to be defined (What do you actually want to find out? And how will this information you collected help you make a decision?) Then, the right method can be selected for this goal.
• Recruiting: You can only empower your team to make good product decisions by including the right test participants. Participants that don’t fit the end user profile might even provide results that lead the product in a wrong direction!
• Legal: There are multiple legal requirements to consider, such as privacy when collecting personal data (GDPR), intellectual property of SAP’s products, as well as confidentiality and revelation of trade secrets.

User research blog post roundup

At SAP, we have written extensively about user research over the years. In the roundup below, you’ll find the blog posts sorted by topic: User research methods, user research case studies, basics and benefits of user research, personal insights from behind the scenes at SAP Design, design-thinking and prototyping. Each blog comes with a short summary and keywords that will help to orient you.

It’s a mixture of more recent pieces and also oldies but goodies that were migrated from the former SAP User Experience Community.

User research methods

Statistical approaches and analysis

User research case studies

Basics and benefits of user research

Design-thinking and prototyping

User research: Behind the scenes at SAP Design

Further resources and training

For an overview from SAP’s design research experts about field research, sign up for the external openSAP offering Basics of Design Research. For internal information about training courses, templates, tools, and much more, please join the User Research @ SAP Jam group.

To learn more about the SAP Fiori user experience, please visit the community topic page.

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