Introducing SAP Fiori

SAP Fiori is the design language that brings great user experiences to enterprise applications based on SAP User Experience. It works seamlessly on desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

The three dimensions in which SAP Fiori is defined are design, principles, and technology. In each dimension, rules and guidelines from optic, handling, interactions, and architectures to technologies in development and the system landscape are in place to define what SAP Fiori really is.

All details of the SAP Fiori design are available as guidelines for general use. You can find all aspects of the SAP Fiori design starting with the five core design principles up to floorplans of pages and details for UI elements. There are also several resources available for download, such as stencils, the SAP icon font or font 72, to empower customers to design their own apps.

To access SAP Fiori design guidelines, visit SAP Fiori Design Guidelines.

The source of the SAP UX Strategy and, therefore, SAP Fiori, is design thinking. SAP offers tools and technologies to empower customers to realize user experience on their own. Let's see how SAP tools and technologies support SAP Fiori UX strategy.

In the second dimension, SAP Fiori offers a unified user experience for a variety of clients. Users should have a consistent, coherent, simple, intuitive, and delightful user experience on all devices to be able to work better and more efficiently. The five design principles of SAP Fiori are at the core of every SAP Fiori app to fulfill these goals. The role-based approach is, therefore, the biggest change in comparison with classic user interfaces.

SAP Fiori has changed user experience and empowered users to use role-based applications as compared to functional-based applications. 

Watch the video to learn how SAP Fiori has changed user experience from functional-based to role-based.

Technology is another dimension of SAP Fiori. Shall we look at how it all started and how SAP Fiori continually evolved since its debut in 2013?

One of the most requested new aspects was to provide more information on home pages supported via cards. In addition, SAP reimagined how aspects of intelligence such as natural language interaction and machine intelligence can become a key part of the experience. It deeply integrated them into the foundation of the design, providing the following features:

• A new theme for a fresh, modern look and feel.
• Intelligent home pages showing everything the user must focus on.
• Digital assistant with fully integrated conversational user experience.
• Active business situation handling, with explanations, insights, and proposed actions.
• Dynamic content to support intelligent apps with embedded artificial intelligence (AI).
• Improved search previews, results pages, and result visualizations.
• A central inbox, also integrated with the digital assistant.

The goal of SAP Fiori 3 was to provide the perfect user interface for the intelligent enterprise fully supporting experience management.

Sound good? But, what do we mean by intelligent enterprise?

The experience economy has changed the way businesses compete. Today, organizations must continuously listen to the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of customers, employees, suppliers, partners, and all other stakeholders. This type of data is called experience data (X-data).

Businesses must be able to interpret and analyze large amounts of X-data, and understand its relationship to the operational data (O-data) of the business.

SAP delivers expertise across every industry in end-to-end processes that link together different systems. For example, "Recruit to Retire" links together financial planning, headcount planning, contractor management, and staffing into seamless end-to-end processes. This gives companies real-time understanding of the relationship between financial forecasts and workforce needs, costs, and assumptions.