Newsbyte: SAP App Development Competition Highlights Superior User Experience

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Jul 30, 2015, 09:00 ET

WALLDORF, Germany, July 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP NEWSBYTE -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP), together with thousands of customers and partners, successfully concluded one of the largest crowdsourcing initiatives in the enterprise world. A free online course "Build Your Own SAP Fiori App in the Cloud" was delivered through the openSAP platform and offered a holistic approach to app design, including design thinking. The initiative resulted in the design of more than 1,500 unique SAP Fiori® apps created by customers, partners and students on SAP HANA® Cloud Platform.

The SAP Fiori user experience is the latest SAP innovation for business software. Applying modern design principles and delivering a personalized, role-based experience across lines of business, it optimizes usability on different types of devices to improve business interactions and ease use. SAP® Business Suite software includes many SAP Fiori apps, but SAP customers have innovative business processes of their own to differentiate themselves from the competition. SAP HANA Cloud Platform addresses their need to build applications to support those business processes and integrate them with SAP Business Suite applications.

As part of the course's hands-on learning experience, participants built their own SAP Fiori apps using SAP Web IDE and SAP HANA Cloud Platform. SAP Web IDE is a cloud-based integrated development environment with a growing set of embedded tools that cover the development process end to end. The development environment allows users to collaborate with business experts and designers to fulfill user requirements and expectations more effectively.

Beyond its innovative technology platform, SAP attributes this crowdsourcing success to the combination of the following key factors:

Weekly open forums specific to current course material focused collaboration among learners and SAP experts and fed valuable feedback into the following week's course content.
Enterprise gamification, here in the form of an app creation challenge, sparked competitive instincts that led to unusually high participation and completion rates.
Peer reviews of the submitted apps made scalability in the grading process possible.
Many of the learner-submitted SAP Fiori apps were of production-level quality, a feat the judges credited to the fact that learning content was based on the tried-and-proven SAP Best Practices family of packages.

"Every participant in the app challenge gained valuable skills in creating SAP Fiori apps for their own unique use cases while having a lot of fun amidst intense interaction, especially when compared to traditional learning experiences," said Michael Kleinemeier, member of the Global Managing Board of SAP SE. "Enterprise gamification combined with SAP Best Practices packages, a cloud-based development environment and a massive open online course platform are a winning combination."

The challenge of developing SAP Fiori apps on the openSAP platform inspired thousands of participants to work within the context of their individual experiences to build for their own use cases. The initiative testifies to the commitment and renewed focus of SAP on customer user experience, with SAP planning to offer more of these unique learning experiences in the near future.

For more information on the app challenge program and to view the winning apps, please visit the gallery. For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contact:
Martin Gwisdalla, SAP, +49 (6227) 7-67275, [email protected], CET
Shauna Kelleher, FleishmanHillard, +1 (617) 692-0511, [email protected], EST

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SOURCE SAP SE