Often it is the non-technical talks at conferences that provide the most fascinating insights into the IT industry. We can get so bogged down in the details that we fail to step back and see the whole picture.
SAP senior user experience design specialists Tina Rauschenbach and Janina Schulyk’s talk ‘More than colours and white spaces: designing enterprise applications’ at Codemotion Rome 2018 highlighted how designing good applications is complex, involves analytical and creative thinking, as well as a lot of tedious, but necessary work.
Defining a design language that cares about end users and empowers designers to create appealing and intuitive apps – while covering business needs and ensuring consistency – is a major challenge. During the talk, Tina and Janina shared their insights and best practices based on their own journey.
We caught up with the pair for further insights into the world of designers and to find out what they thought of their first Codemotion conference: Tina Rauschenbach and Janina Schulyk senior user experience design specialist at SAP.
The most important quality of a user experience designer is, in my opinion, that you have to be curious, you have to love what you do and also it is important that you like to communicate. You have to communicate with your developer and with a lot of people and they have to like you.
Tina is a senior user experience design specialist at sap design at SAP. She knows how good User Interface design can change the perception of a product and a company. Tina consults other application teams and is part of a review process to achieve consistent user experience across the product portfolio. Tina is also working on global concepts and works closely together with development on the final implementation. To gather user feedback, she also planned, prepared and contacted user testings.
I love the Codemotion conference. It’s my first time here and we did a lot of nice networking. I now know quite a lot of new people and also the topics, the speakers – I have been in a lot of talks and they have been really great.
Codemotion for me is: ice-cream networking!
Janina is an UX designer within the global design team of SAP. She focuses on providing a framework and predefined templates for the most common application patterns. Previously, Janina worked for more than three years as an OpenUI5 engineer, and was one of the drivers behind the open sourcing activities.
“The most difficult challenge in my enterprise designer career so far was that I really had to convince our stakeholders that there is a need for that specific feature in this specific design. I really had to talk and talk to them to explain it again and again, so in the end they got it. And then also the implementation was possible, but it was a really long, long way to get there.
The funniest experience I have had so far in my career is that I was in a meeting and in the beginning, I thought there was kind of an escalation between design and development. But then I found out that they both wanted exactly the same thing but somehow they were talking in different languages. But because I was a software developer before, I could somehow translate, even if it was the same language. I could just translate for them and then both parties were really happy and there was no escalation at all.
I really enjoyed Codemotion, from the speakers to the attendees to the staff. Everybody is really nice and supportive. We got really great feedback, we really enjoyed our talk, there were many people there and we did not expect that many people, so this was really great. So Codemotion in one word for me is: exciting.