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Comment by zxienin | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if good interfaces can not be built in SAP, or if it's very difficult to do, or if the developers of apps on SAP platform just don't care.

Up until some 5 years back, UX really was afterthought to them. Why? Answer is in how enterprise software was (and largely still) sold. Buying was done by CIO, based on all parameters (account relationship, FOMO, $$$ discounts, functional reliability etc.) except user acceptance.

SAP simply didn't have incentive and KPI to see UX as focus. Users were "trained" to use SAP after rollouts.

With what is fancy termed as "consumerization of IT", SAP has been forced to change. They've been trying their best with Fiori v1, v2, v3 since then. Change takes time to get hold in SAP world, specially given large on-premise installed base, where customers take years to adopt a release upgrade.

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SAP is designed based on priority of the requirements by people in a company who will never use it but will ask their staff to extract the data and present them in PowerPoint or excel.

So the UI design of SAP is user hostile. Even by embracing modern web components and openUI toolkit SAP will continue to be user hostile design.

SAP will need to change the foundations completely to change it and also re do things. But then it will put them in direct competition with modern software makers who can beat them.

So I am doubtful things will change, SAP will go the path of IBM in times to come.

Not having much experience with SAP (but having dealt with frustrating enterprise software), I know what people mean by user-hostile UI/UX. It's a symptom of a systemic issue commonly seen in corporations, government, public administration, any large institution.

It's what happens when the users have no choice in the matter, there is no reasonable alternative or competition - therefore no incentive to change or improve.

Whether it's intentionally designed to be user-hostile, I've suspected (and doubted) that myself.. There might be a logical explanation how that's desirable or even profitable, as a kind of moat or gate-keeping.

With its legacy and massive complexity, SAP would require a visionary to re-architect it from the ground up. Unfortunately, that rarely happens in enterprise software.

We can only hope that scrappy startups arise to replace and evolve.

While the first thing is in itself bad enough, it becomes just dangerous when these powerpoint higher-ups refuse to, and don't, understand how SAP, and thus an integral part of their business, works. Saw that more than once. Which is also one big reason why the SAP instances I worked with at multiple companies are that bad. Not necessarily bacause of SAP, but because of tech-iliterate old-guard managers trying to work with "computers" and "software".

one has to differentiate between SAP the product and SAP as implemented by random big-co. The parts that are user actively confusing and user hostile are usually result of customization done during the implementation (and motivated either by requirement to keep some existing ad-hoc process or by requirement to have some report contain something that is otherwise irrelevant for its contents).

It is certainly not true that SAP does not care about UX (in fact the reason why SAPgui has it's decidedly non-native look is result of some UX research in late 90's), only the UX they care about is not about easy onboarding, but about efficiency of use. And by the way in my opinion SAPgui manages exceptionally well to combine power user features with discoverability (on the UI toolkit level).

In my previous company, there is a senior worked on SAP for a long period of time. In his point of view, the UI of SAP was nice in 90s, but they are outdated now. And you can’t customise the user interface with what you want. He also thinks we should not put too much effort in learning SAP product as a developer because he thinks ERP is not not for this generation. He suggested We can learn the integration with SAP, but don’t waste most our time to learn the SAP configuration from the top to the bottom, SAP programming etc.

> ERP is not not for this generation

This generation has options for creating full custom software faster than one can configure an ERP.

> This generation has options for creating full custom software faster than one can configure an ERP.

No we can't do that, because the real world is messy. I currently work on a SAP system and the amount of localization and customization that was done for you is inexpensive for big corp. And you know that SAP will last the next 30 years, you don't know that about your Framework of choice.

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