By Hallo Kho, Vice President of Design, SAP
2023 has brought renewed enthusiasm towards the transformative potential of innovation following a tumultuous previous year for tech, when funding and investments significantly dropped.
Facing mounting economic, environmental, and political challenges, we look to technology with much hope to bring advancements for our society. As the pressure to innovate at a rapid pace increases, the thoughtfulness and ethics around how we move forward is also growing.
Unfortunately, the term “innovation” is thrown around as frequently as “design.” It can be capitalized, harnessed, defined by different principles, and even misunderstood. While I have a deep appreciation for innovation, I believe that it’s important to approach our creations with some caution.
Who exactly are we innovating for?
Not many people find themselves innovating for such a large and diverse user base as my colleagues and I do. From a designer’s perspective, one of the biggest draws to SAP is its scale. It’s hard to not be pulled into its orbit serving 87% of the global workforce. But with that reach comes an incredibly valuable responsibility.
As product designers, we often talk about human-centered innovation. We push ourselves to make our available products accessible, and we are building an inclusive approach to innovation. In thinking about the future, we prioritize understanding our users better as a starting point. This is true no matter how many users we serve.
Future trends in innovation, as heard from our users
Earlier this year, we launched a long-term study with end users to understand their pain points and successes. Understanding the people who use our products is the key to creating future value.
Our initial insights, drawn from foundational research, reveal these six signals from the future market:
1. Platform Landscape: Customers and end users expect a seamless flow of experiences and intelligent, logical software. Users have grown to expect interoperability, intelligent functionality and data integration. We need to aim for scalability without compromising performance, security or overall ease of use.
2. Climate Future: Predictable changes and fluctuating variables include access to electricity, shifts in resource markets, and alterations in the length of the workday. Our transition to renewable energy sources may create intermittent access to electricity that is dependent on weather conditions. Extreme weather events can and have already damaged infrastructure that has caused power outages and longer-term access issues. The move to energy efficiency may reduce access in regions that are unable to apply the technology required. Grid resilience is expected to be affected in regions susceptible to climate-related disasters.
3. Accessibility and Flexibility: UX needs to accommodate accessibility, flexibility, and environmental inclusivity. When we consider the uncontrollable factors in our future, how we create both in design and development, we need to employ flexible systems to accommodate our future in our approach to design and development.
4. Future Tech Willingness and Acceptance: We need to consider ethics as part of our creation process as we leap into the future of AI possibilities. We must build an environment that will provide moral governance to guide our acceptance and ensure future stability for a tech that is changing and improving at lightening speed.
5. New Lifestyle Levers: Consumers are adapting to overcome physical distances and embracing tech-driven shifts in their daily routines due to demographic and economic changes. Despite many companies calling employees back to brick and mortar, we have learned that we can work from everywhere, and with governance, we can increase our productivity.
6. Inclusive Processes by Design: Designing experiences for the future is no longer left to arbitrary decision-makers. An inclusive design approach starts with the research recruitment process and includes fields, roles, age, gender, ethnicity and disability. It continues with broadened testing and a deeper comprehension of results.
Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprise on www.sap.com/design.
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