Every organization’s success is driven by its most valuable asset: its people. With SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite, we provide the technology, solutions, and best practices to help our customers future proof their workforce by putting people at the center of everything. Ensuring their workforce is set up for success means providing employees with an outstanding user experience (UX) that helps them get work done faster and easier.
SAP SuccessFactors solutions help people be as productive as possible at work and can maximize the potential of any workforce. At the heart of our UX innovation strategy is a deep understanding of user behaviors and priorities. We have an in-house team of behavioral scientists who work in partnership with our product research team, design experts, and our customers. Together, they bring a unique – and proprietary – perspective to designing solutions based on how people behave and what they need to be productive at work.
That research has driven our recent major investments in UX. The past few years, the focus of our innovation has been to pair modern design elements with intelligent technologies, so people can quickly complete everyday tasks and feel more accomplished, supported, and engaged. This has created a new and wholly improved suite experience for our customers – and the work is only just beginning. The journey we’re on to deliver a people-centric user experience for our customers is realized through three key objectives: simplifying HR tasks, driving employee adoption and engagement, and delivering connected service experiences to meet the needs of today’s diverse and dispersed workforce.
Simplifying Everyday Tasks
One overarching mission of ours is to simplify everyday HR tasks and increase productivity with high-impact, intuitive functionality. Continuous modernization with refreshed colors and information hierarchy creates a seamless, delightful user interface and enhanced accessibility that your workforce can confidently and efficiently navigate and interact with.
And simplification extends even beyond our own solutions – a modern approach means we’re continuously embedding high-value, critical HR processes directly into partner applications that employees use frequently. We integrate SAP SuccessFactors solutions with other workplace technology solutions to help keep users productive, what we call meeting people in the flow of work. For example, integrations allow people to perform HR tasks within Microsoft Teams, including asking for and receiving feedback from their managers.
All of which leads to the greatest evolution in UX we can expect in the coming years: business artificial intelligence (AI). SAP has the broadest suite of business applications on the planet, positioning us to be able to deliver the first true system of intelligence and fundamentally change the way in which companies operate. At SAP, we are embedding multiple types of AI – predictive, generative, and conversational, which are each uniquely targeted to improving experiences across the entire SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite, including talent acquisition, talent management, and core HR.
We’re already delivering on this vision with new innovations, such as using generative AI to help build compelling job descriptions and predictive AI to help employees find personalized learning opportunities.
Driving User Adoption and Engagement
We strive to create delightful and intuitive experiences that leave people with a sense of accomplishment and support. That means enabling inclusive experiences that empower all employees to operate in an application with meaningful content, functionality, and efficiency. This guides our design decisions and how we deliver innovative ways that address the unique requirements of each and every individual. Personalization is a must with today’s digital expectations, which is why we use data and insights to help anticipate and act on employee needs and expectations by empowering them with meaningful and individualized experiences.
To that end, our modern Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori helps provide a consistent UX. With intuitive experiences across the entire SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite, this helps to accelerate adoption of our software and accelerate learning curves. We delivered the Horizon visual theme to customers with our 1H 2023 release, and with the 2H 2023 release the vast majority of experiences in our products will be standardized in the Horizon visual theme.
Another example of how we are improving engagement is with dynamic engagement cards in SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone, delivered earlier this year. These cards can deliver personalized, relevant, and timely news, announcements, and learning opportunities directly to employees’ SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone dashboards.
Of course, UX extends past the look and feel of our products and into overarching career experiences as well. The whole-self model, which takes into account each individual’s unique collection of interests, motivations, and preferences, forms the foundation for some of our most exciting capabilities and products, like dynamic teams, SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, and the talent intelligence hub. These can enable organizations to become skills-based and future-ready enterprises. For example, our new learning home page can surface learning recommendations to employees based on their interests, passions, and skills – so they can create a career and development path based on what’s best for them.
Delivering Connected HR Service Experiences
The third pillar driving our UX strategy is all about efficiency and improving service delivery for HR and beyond. Instead of forcing employees to guess where to find things with endless clicks and links or awaiting responses from a support specialist, employees can expect an experience that is intuitive, responsive, and connected across different services.
With guided experiences within SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone, for example, HR leaders can create workflow-based, personalized journeys for employees that take them through a multi-step process possibly spanning multiple systems. This can make the onboarding journey, for example, frictionless and delightful for new workers – a critical time to make a good first impression. We are especially focused on the experience of deskless workers in 2024. Furthermore, our integrated knowledge base helps reduce HR tickets and can provide employees with quick answers, promoting the shared knowledge and fostering a more informed team.
Looking Ahead
With each release, we are continuously evolving SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite and redefining what’s possible for HR solutions. Our vision is to continuously create a seamless, intelligent, and integrated user experience that reflects modern employee preferences and workplace realities. As we look ahead, we will continue to invest and improve on our UX with new and emerging tech, like AI, to deliver the experiences workers need – and deserve.
Learn more about how SAP SuccessFactors solutions and human experience management can power your people-centered UX transformation. Existing customers can learn more about ensuring they’ve implemented our most up-to-date UX innovations.
To learn more about the second half 2023 release, visit the SAP SuccessFactors Community.
Siva Sundaresan is SVP of Applications Engineering at SAP SuccessFactors.