Custom Forms (2017 to present)

Custom Forms

"It usually takes months to build a form and move it to production, but now with Custom Forms I can get the requirements in the morning and by lunch, I can have the form ready to use."

Role

Design Leader

Overview

I joined SAP Arina in 2023 as a Principal UX Designer. One of my initial projects was Custom Forms, which was strategically important. At the start, I was the sole designer responsible for research and design. Our CTO recognized the pain associated with the existing offering for our customers, which had a poor experience but still provided significant business value. I took on the challenge and collaborated with the leadership team to establish a strong foundation for the project through user research and design. Eventually, I transitioned into a managerial role, overseeing a team of designers dedicated to this project.

Vision

Our vision is to create a low-code, no-code tool for our customers to solve their business needs and not worry about building and integrating them.

User problem

Meet Joe, a category manager at ABC inc. Joe is responsible for reducing cost by replacing noncatalog purchases with purchases from approved suppliers. Purchasing catalog items from approved suppliers gives the company complete visibility to the spent and allows the company to negotiate a better contract with suppliers. However, this is not that easy, as there are so many different types of purchases ABC inc need to make, and it is not always possible for them to create custom request forms for each of those purchases. So, Joe works with the SAP customer support team to create custom order request forms for high-frequency purchases only. However, this also takes months, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to create a new form or update an existing one. Joe is not happy with this process, and this also limits his ability to meet the company goal of cutting costs.

Meet David, the CEO of Herge oil inc. One of Davis's goals is to decrease noncatalog spent and get complete visibility to the entire spend. However, to achieve this, he has to spend millions in creating customized solutions. With the ever-changing market and demand, it's hard for him to keep up, and he is losing millions in expenses. He is very frustrated.

Meet Dana, the IT customization specialist. Dana is responsible for streamlining service requests such as Facility, IT, and HR issues. Dana must rely on partners and software providers for solutions to meet the demand and provide the best service. But, getting new software or create custom solutions is challenging and expensive. So, Dana must rely on standard request forms and gather information manually by working with the requesters. Manual work makes Dana's job hard, and she has to hire lots of people to meet the demand. With cost-cutting measures from the company, Dana's job is getting harder and harder to meet the demand. As a result, his company's employees have to wait days and weeks to get their request fulfilled. Dana is heartbroken and feeling helpless.

Discovery

We conducted several design thinking sessions with customers to focus primarily on their needs and wants.
From this research, we found that the majority of our customers really need a simple tool to create request forms with basic needs such as input fields, a data table, approval flow, and basic conditions and expressions. Findings from our research helped us focus on MVP and build our vision from there. We create our first version of customs forms in less than six months. In our first release, we focused on ease of use by allowing users to drag and drop widgets such as dropdowns, text fields, etc., to a canvas to create, then test them and publish them for the end-user to use. We conducted several usability studies using our MVP and iterated our designs based on the findings.

Vision

Our vision is to create a low-code, no-code tool for our customers to solve their business needs and not worry about building and integrating them.

Solution

We got an inventory of features that we knew we would need to create an effective form builder, and then we identified what we need right now and what can come later based on the type of forms we wanted to support from right away.