Sketchin

Improving the B2B choice experience

We’ve helped SAP make its offer more understandable, by creating a configurator that guides the sales force to a personalized choice of the most suitable product for the clients’ needs.

We’ve helped SAP make its offer more understandable, by creating a configurator that guides the sales force to a personalized choice of the most suitable product for the clients’ needs.

Industry

Fintech & Insurtech

Year

2015

Client

SAP

A guide to the right solution

There are plenty of companies worldwide that have chosen SAP to manage their Operations and Customer Services. The solutions SAP offers are various and try to solve the needs of a large number of B2B entities: from the aerospace industry to healthcare, from sport to telecommunications. In such a complicated scenario, finding the right solution for each need is not always easy. SAP sales force and the client might get lost when facing the choice.

That’s why SAP asked us to redesign their cloud configurator; a tool to support its clients — middle managers looking for software solutions to enhance the efficiency of their divisions — and the sales force in exploring its offer. The existing tool had serious usability issues and required a heavy cognitive load to be understood; it implied a pre-existing knowledge of the SAP offer and was not very pleasant to use.

The goal was clear and challenging: 4 weeks to develop a unique solution to turn the company-centred communication approach into a user-centred one. The new cloud configurator had to easily frame the B2B clients’ needs and, in doing so, become a source of qualified leads and actual support for the sales force.

Outcome

The project team has thus started an intense co-design process involving all the stakeholders — designers, clients and developers — in 4 subsequent iterations. During each sprint, the experience offered by the configurator has been progressively defined to achieve the current state.

The solution is a tool that highlights the value of every single product; a guide in the personalised choice of the most suitable product for the clients’ needs, according to a progressive disclosure approach. At the same time, the cloud configurator diminishes people’s cognitive load by using a solution inspired by gamebooks: taking small, simple decisions that help frame the need.

Optimized and future-proof

We have designed a step-by-step flow that highlights the reason behind every little choice so that at the end of the configuration the benefits the client can get from purchasing a SAP product are evident. The configurator creates an immersive experience, allowing the client to completely focus on the SAP offering.

Some distinctive design solutions have been adopted:

  • We took inspiration from Google Material Design to make the interface simple and intuitive;
  • We chose animations that could increase affordance and ease the comprehension;
  • We optimised the website for a tablet resolution to make it an efficient tool in supporting sales;
  • We defined a flexible visual language that is compatible with any SAP future evolution.

The new cloud configurator was successfully presented at the Milan SAP Forum in November 2014 and because of its ability to meet the clients’ needs and behaviours, the same approach has been extended to other SAP products and solutions in Europe as well.

Project numbers

designers in the Sketchin team
3
weekly iterations
Four

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