The Usability Problem in SAP HR

According to 'The Psychology of Design' in the latest SAP Spectrum magazine, research found that roughly 10% of software users' time is spent dealing with usability issues. That is really a significant amount of time! Let's say you are using software half of your work day – not an unreasonable portion, I think. In the course of a week that means you are spending 2 hours dealing with software issues: it doesn't work well, you can't get it to do what you need, it has bugs or crashes, or you simply spend time trying to figure out how to do what needs to be done.

If I could gain 2 hours of time in a given week, I would be sure to do that! Multiply that 2 hours by the number of 'knowledge workers' you have and it's apparent that this is a serious productivity issue. If you could get 10% more productivity out of your physical assets – printing presses, airplanes, paper machines, foundries and so on – the only question people would ask is why you hadn't recognized and solved that problem long ago. Perhaps we could be as disciplined about knowledge workers' productivity with software as we are with productivity of fixed assets?

There are guidelines for making software more usable. For example, there are ISO standards 13407 and 9241. There are all sorts of books written specifically about developing usable software; one of my favorites is 'Don't Make Me Think' by Steve Krug, and there are dozens of others. Why is usability very seldom much of a concern when SAP HR is being implemented? Over my 14 years of consulting it has only come up a few times, from the more forward-thinking IT groups.

SAP HR in the R3 GUI is not a very intuitive experience. Learning how to be productive with employee data maintenance (transaction PA30 for example), or navigating and working with the Organization Structure (transaction PPOME) takes quite a while. The Off-Cycle Workbench (PUOC_10) for US Payroll brings a lot of functions together, but I still to this day want to double-click on a given paycheck to see the detail. Why can't I double-click to see the detail? Why do I have to select the paycheck then navigate over to another button and click it to see the detail?

The Self-Service and Portal applications are easier to use, but still clunky compared to other web/intranet experiences. With HR Forms and Processes we can now use Adobe forms and SAP workflow to do a lot of custom processes. How much effort do we put into designing an easy to use, functional and efficient user experience with those? Where do you draw the line on feature-creep with a form?

What role does usability have in your process and user interface design? To what degree are end-users included in those design processes? From my experience, the answer in most cases is 'not enough', and that needs to change. Reducing that 10% by half is quite a gain, and very realistic to achieve if we put some focus on SAP HR usability.