Towards the end of my 9 years with SAP I did a 3-month fellowship with the DCC (Design Co-Innovation Center) team where I worked on a project with one of SAP’s major oil and gas customer. 

Together with a colleague I created a financial dashboard based on SAP technologies. We iterated on existing designs and worked on a new dashboard as well. 

For the iteration of the existing designs, we conducted group interviews with business analysts from different business lines and tried to understand their challenges and needs based on the current designs. We synthesized the findings, ideated and validated with the analysts multiple times. We met with potential end users and conducted a mini workshop where we let them partake in designing possible solutions. We ideated and validated all ideas with the stakeholders and refined the designs till we netted out on the final solution. 

The designs provide meaningful and insightful visualization with intuitive interface for all business lines.  

And I did…
…conduct group interviews, create wireframes, produce visual designs and validate ideas.

Challenges
The access to real end users was a problem. We sometimes had to deal with proxy users, which we needed to take in consideration when designing wireframes and validating them.

Key takeaways
It was the first time that I got to work with an oil and gas company. To learn about their process was very insightful and interesting. There are definitely a lot of players in the game ;)