With over 45 years of experience and expertise in 25 industries, SAP is in a unique position to help customers transform their business into intelligent enterprises.
As chief design officer at SAP, it is my guiding vision to make working with the intelligent enterprise delightful and productive. This is why my organization, SAP Design, is bringing today’s most advanced technologies into our software — we want to make the enterprise user experience superbly intuitive.
Passed down to us over countless generations and thousands of years, our evolutionary heritage has given us skills and abilities to interpret and manage our physical, social, digital and emotional environments. We believe that by adapting interactions to people’s innate capabilities, we can reach our goal of making work delightfully natural and productive. Therefore, we have chosen to cooperate with EMOTIV, the market leader in mobile neuroinformatics solutions that give individual users personalized feedback on their cognitive performance and needs in the workplace.
Introducing Focus UX
It’s no secret that the modern business world involves fast-paced tasks, decisions, and opportunities using more data than ever before. Already today, people report increased stress and cognitive overload. But imagine that, if you want it to, the system could detect your cognitive state and then adapt the user experience (UX) to best fit what you are able to handle at that moment. Imagine also that just by looking at the screen, the system can know what interests you most and allows you to interact with that information without a mouse or keyboard. We call this “focus UX” and believe that it will result in a much more adaptive, personal and natural way of using and interacting with software, thus improving well-being and productivity in the workplace.

By leveraging real-time analyses of people’s cognitive state, the system can give users helpful feedback about their cognitive load, stress and attention levels.
Olivier Oullier, president of EMOTIV, said to me recently, “Offering solutions that are efficient, ethical and safe is key to adoption. Sustainable trust and engagement of our users are priorities for us.”
SAP and EMOTIV both share the belief that technologies should be applied in accordance with ethical principles. Because after all, we want people to feel empowered and good about using focus UX.
By pairing SAP’s award-winning design expertise with EMOTIV’s very forward-looking, scalable neurotechnology, we are front-runners in exploring an exciting new era in human-enterprise UX that aims to provide people with a bespoke view of their work coupled with hands-free interaction when they need it most.
Maricel Cabahug is chief design officer at SAP.
This story originally appeared on the SAP User Experience Community site.