Design Thinking – Excerpt from SAP OpenUI5 for Mobile BI and Analytics

Excerpt from SAP OpenUI5 for Mobile BI and Analytics by SAP Mentor Raquel Seville.

Design Thinking
What if you could redesign your Excel experience? Is there anything you would change with the popular spreadsheet tool? Can you map from start to finish how your experience was? Does the software address all your needs or where does it fall short? How about your favorite BI tool? If you had to document your step-by-step process using the tool, what would it look like?

Think about the last website you used: How was your experience? What if you could create a process map — from the time you first had the idea to visit the website all the way to when you closed the browser? What words would you use to describe that experience and how did you feel throughout the process?

The main takeaway message from this chapter is that a good, or even a great, experience can be improved and there is significant opportunity to change a bad design. If we adjust our thinking to how our audience feels and how our design works, rather than be driven
simply by how it looks, then we have started the journey towards design thinking.

Let’s start by defining “design thinking”.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, defines design thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity”.

If the key words and phrases from the definition above are highlighted, we get an overview of the design thinking process. Firstly, the designer’s sensibility and methods refer not only to one’s ability to be talented and skillful, but also to acknowledge and respond to emotional drivers, while appreciating the beauty and the idiosyncrasies of each individual. The magic happens when we can be discerning and intuitive by striking a balance between customer value and business opportunity.

The design thinking process, shown in Figure 3.1, has five notable stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Each stage can be revisited and used to fine-tune results. There are no strict guidelines forcing you to follow a linear progression, and you can make adjustments to suit your needs and requirements. There is no single route to achieving the desired outcome because the outcome is unknown and is driven by the user’s needs and not your own biases.

Figure 3.1: Design thinking process

The increased adoption of HTML5 has created the opportunity for developers to build applications that work seamlessly across multiple devices and browsers. This expert guide covers the foundations of CSS, HTML5 and jQuery, as well as a broad range of topics from design thinking, testing, optimization, security, graphs, maps and databases. All of these help you to build a seamless mobile business intelligence (SAP BI) app using HTML5, leveraging the cohesiveness of SAP OpenUI5. Explore why design thinking should sit at the core of your mobile application. Compare and contrast using native versus web-based applications. Explore the tools available to develop mobile apps, as well as easily write HTML5 code from scratch. Learn how to create a reusable skeleton code framework that you can leverage on future projects, as well as how to build web apps using SAP OpenUI5. Explore considerations for an effective security and privacy strategy. Acquire best practices on how to test and enhance your HTML5 site by enabling compression, caching, and optimizing your images. In addition to practice exercises, this book includes free sample layout options for different mobile devices and an OpenUI5 Starter Kit. By using practical examples, tips, and screenshots, the author brings the building of mobile BI apps to life.

– Delve into the foundations of CSS, HTML5, and jQuery
– Learn how to build a seamless mobile BI app using SAP OpenUI5
– Use open source library d3.js to create custom data visualizations for bar, line, and pie charts
– Build web apps using real world scenarios and test layout options for different mobile devices

Start reading now!

Author Raquel Seville, M.Sc. B.A., is an SAP Mentor and business intelligence professional with over a decade of experience working for fast-paced, complex, and demanding multinational telecommunications companies. She has designed and implemented data warehouses, management reports, predictive analytics and executive dashboards. Raquel is the founder of the popular business intelligence blog exportBI.com.