Journey
PROJECT 2019
SUMMARY
Turn non-sustainability manager into successful sustainability manager
When I was leading the design vision for Sustain, it was critical that our UX strategy was aligned with the product team to best position Sustain as part of the broader SAP ecosystem. I ensured that the team understand the most impactful product opportunities that could scale and empathize for users who were reflections of enterprise employees who care about sustainability issues but lacks business sustainability knowledge and the tools needed to start taking action.
A big challenge for me was to figure out a mental model that works for enterprise employees with little to some knowledge or experience working on company-wide sustainability goals. This was a key experience design that involves lots of cross-functional alignment, user research, and concept development, which turned out to be a great milestone toward our north star.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
How might we help enterprise employees and their teams start taking actions to move towards “net zero” transformation？
The complexity of coming up with appropriate sustainability strategy to achieve sustainability goals is daunting. Most teams and individuals don’t know where to start. From customer interviews, we found out that teams, managers rely on researching examples, referring to sustainability practices from industry leaders, while still figuring out strategies that work in the areas of their responsibility.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Choose a journey to adopt sustainable approaches with ease
Based on these early insights, and knowing that there are many existing strategies out there practiced by industry leaders, we could leverage and standardize for users to quickly get started. I proposed the “journey” concept with these key ideas:
We help frame sustainability challenges for users to jumpstart the workflows with preset strategies to help them achieve specific sustainability goals faster.
Provide a focused theme workspace where users can work on strategies collaboratively with stakeholders, and easily link supporting projects to related goals
“Journey starter” idea & storyboard of connecting the experience elements I defined with the team.
The system behind each journey
Coming out of the early whiteboarding sessions with the team without much debate, we agreed that the journey starter idea is very straightforward and could easily scale for more sustainability use cases. I continued to map out the journey architecture in the Sustain app we were going to build.
“Journey” architecture map with a focus on solving how the journey elements could be easily accessed across the main app.
PRODUCT STRATEGY ALIGNMENT
Repositioning Sustain to focus on providing clarity for strategy generation.
A critical step was aligning with SAP’s executive leadership on the early concept of the platform. The “journey” concept I shared got customers’ supplier management teams excited about using the product to manage sustainability in their supply chain. We got buy-in and continued evolving the product concept with further definition of the key functionalities we invested in developing.
Our initial idea of building a strategy workspace turned out to be a collaborative effort with “ruum” team within SAP, already working on building the next generation work management tool that empowers non-technical users to digitally streamline collaboration and accelerate workflows with no-code work and process management. So we focused our energy and resources on solving the user problems at clarity stage.
KEY EXPERIENCE DESIGN
01
Journey, a new mental model
I continued to refine the Journey concept model which streamlines strategy generation with a sustainability theme. A theme is assigned to a workspace linked with sustainability goals, KPIs, and workflows…It also serves as a bridge between the Sustain app and SAP Ruum work management tools as we leveraged the solution to quickly build a holistic product experience.
Communication framework that explained what the journey model is.
Journey starter chooser
“As a Category Manager, I want to help my suppliers develop their skills and knowledge in order to boost their sustainability performance, but I lack resources and tools to put the strategy into practice.”
Simply by choosing a theme that makes sense, the user can start the processes he needs to achieve the results he wanted.
Popover modal chosen for the interaction design of journey starter chooser. The UI design focusing on easy navigation and understanding the theme of each journey item.
Journey creation flow
The flow design was critical. Our team must align with Ruum team on where the touchpoints happening in the flow. I need to ensure the design matches different user’s expectation. This presented several design challenges:
Make the transition between Sutain app and Ruum app feel natural to the user
Promote goal setting in the flow
Adapt to different scenarios based on the chosen theme
We focused our user research and testing effort on supply chain sustainability management experience.
Supply chain sustainability scenario
“Facilitating purposeful supplier development with measurable outcomes is key to advancing supply chain sustainability”
Journey mapping the happy path with key stages and screens for clear guidance on important user input and expectation setting.
End-to-end “journey creation” prototype by me
02
Home page, a reflection of the journey millstones
Besides making navigation in the Sustain app clear by designing a left menu with the main functionalities we had defined, I proposed adding a home page and invited my team to ideate together what would the definition of our home be in the app.
Home concept drawings I put together based on the ideas generated from a group ideation session with the team
I first synthesized the ideas into 3 design directions：
Discovery experience - Allow users to spot risks and discover opportunities to make positive impact on social and environmental responsibility
Journey focused - Maximize the visibility of our “journey” feature, showing progress and positive impact from the work; And give users quick access to go back to their workspaces.
A dashboard - We could show a wide variety of insights and actions to the users and possible of making it customizable.
Home exploration and quick prototyping 3 design directions
Subtraction enables focus on key feature development and scaling for long term product growth
Only until the concepts and ideas were visualized in a structured way, we saw clearly how the product experience could make end users feel and reach their goals. This activity helped us understand the potential of our product deeper in terms of both vision and technical feasibility. We went with the second direction because of the following reasons:
Fit the mental model of most novice users by reducing the complexity at the front
Give more room for iterating our vision to standardize the product experience for market scale.
Focus the team on the effort of perfecting the journey feature in a short term
We tested the prototype of our second direction with potential users from procurement, supplier management, supply chain management teams within the companies, and I refined the home information architecture based on the user feedback:
In addition to seeing the work progress they have made from home, they would love seeing the results or impact from their work too.
More than half of the users expressed interests in learning more about sustainability knowledge and having more ways to play in this domain.
Home page information architecture
UI component “Journey” card anatomy
03
Challenges page, a place for deeper engagement
It’s a long journey moving towards a fully sustainable supply chain, and defining the right amount of work worth spending time on and repeating the cycles of work was quite challenging.
With the goal of elevating users to take action on achieving more ambitious sustainability goals, I turned the basic idea of having a page to list all the journeys user has taken on, into a system of challenges and rewards mechanism. Badges were designed to help users view the work from different perspectives, and unlock more skills for personal growth.
Challenges page information architecture
Badge system design - name definition
IMPACT
The design has served as a strong foundation for SAP’s future enterprise sustainability product development, and helped shape the enterprise UX design principles for the future of business sustainability.
Customers were excited to adopt the solution that addresses the complexity of supply chain sustainability strategy creation and execution.
