Case Study — SAP

Unifying a Fragmented App-Building Experience

SAP Build brought together several separate low-code/no-code tools under one name — but the underlying experience hadn't caught up. I was brought in to help take it from three competing tools to one coherent product, from discovery through short- and long-term design direction.

RoleUX Designer (borrowed)
CompanySAP
TimelineComing soon
ScopeDiscovery → short & long-term design
This work happened alongside a different team than my usual one — I was borrowed onto the effort rather than owning it as part of my regular Product team assignment, working cross-functionally with a group I didn't normally sit with.

Discover

Three tools, three mental models, one confused user.

The starting point was a fragmented toolset — separate editors and lifecycles for different ways of building an app, with no shared thread between them. Research surfaced two clear sets of findings:

Pain points

  • Dilemma: which tool to use — AppGyver, SPA, or BAS?
  • Multi-separated lifecycles across projects
  • Competing tools and concepts: separate UI editors, backend editors, authorization, and deployment
  • The UX didn't fit the persona's mental model — heavy dependencies, poor collaboration
  • Lobby exists at the subaccount level; content is filtered per subaccount — customers with 100+ subaccounts ended up with 100+ separate lobbies

Ideas

  • Break the silos: one type of project instead of several
  • Same editors across the board — UI, backend, authorization, deployment
  • Collaboration: pro-code and low-code builders working on the same project
  • Hide complexity from the builder; expose it to admins to support governance
  • A single project lifecycle
  • One lobby showing all projects at the account level
Discovery artifacts: user journey exploration document, journey profile, and status dashboard
Discovery artifacts — journey exploration doc, journey profile (redacted), and a status dashboard.

User journey

I mapped the current-state journey across the fragmented toolset to make the disconnects visible — where a user had to leave one tool's mental model and re-orient in another, and where the pain points above showed up concretely in the flow.

User journey maps showing the fragmented current-state experience across tools
Current-state journey mapping across the fragmented toolset.

Design: short term

The short-term direction couldn't wait for a full platform unification, so I designed a guided, wizard-style entry point — letting a user pick what they wanted to build ("what type of application," "which process automation type," "which area to configure") and routing them into the right tool with a consistent shell around it, rather than making them choose blind between three product names.

Short-term design variations: guided wizard screens for choosing project type
Short-term direction: a guided wizard to route builders into the right tool without demanding they already know the tooling landscape.

Design: long term

The long-term direction was the real fix: one unified workspace, one lobby at the account level, and shared editors across web and mobile — the "break the silos" idea taken to its full conclusion, with complexity hidden from the builder and surfaced only where admins needed governance controls.

Long-term design direction: unified workspace with shared lobby, editors, and mobile screens
Long-term direction: a single unified workspace and lobby across web and mobile.

What Natalie should add to finish this case study

  • Timeline — when this work happened.
  • Outcome — how much of the short-term and long-term direction actually shipped, and what changed as a result.
  • Clean exports of the design screens, rather than the working Figma board crops used here.
  • Confirm this level of detail (tool names, pain points, subaccount/lobby mechanics) is OK to share publicly — SAP Build itself is a public product, but some of this detail reads as internal strategy.

Note: the visuals here are cropped screenshots from your working Figma file, not polished exports. The "Journey Profile" document includes redacted sections — I kept those as you'd redacted them and didn't attempt to read anything blacked out.