Due to the rich and broad nature of the initial problem scope, we first sought to define our research territory. We held two focus-setting meetings that included our team, the client representative from SAP, and users of current SAP design-time tools from a consulting company. At the meeting, we asked everyone to jot down any questions, problems, concerns they had about the project and composite application design on sticky notes. After gathering input from accessible stakeholders, we arranged these sticky notes into a hierarchical order in the form of an affinity diagram. A number of key focus areas were extracted from the affinity diagram including collaboration, tools integration, model visualization, simulation, and documentation.
To first gain further understanding of our problem scope, our team conducted background research on the area tangential to designing composite applications. We chose to review a mix of business white papers, academic research articles, and tools tutorials and guidelines covering diverse topics related to composite application, service-oriented architecture, business process life-cycle, business process modeling, end-user programming, and other relevant topics. This research prepared us for diving into an unfamiliar domain of expertise as well as provided inspirations to the design of our final solution.
Part of our initial research focused on analyzing the current SAP composite application design-time tools. We examined these tools with established standard usability guidelines. The results of our Heuristic Evaluations largely reflected the complexity of the system and the technical nature of application modeling. Both the process and the result of this evaluation assisted us in better recognizing the problem scope.
Competitive analysis is an assessment of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. Our team examined the key features and vision of the following three competing products in the field of service-oriented application design-time tools from the vendor's point of view:
In addition to becoming aware of the competitors, we were able to understand the scope and nature of the industry. Moreover, this analysis informed us of the paradigm and mental model embraced by the current technologies, which can be leveraged in our solution.
The key to user-centered design is to understand how the users would use the product within their work context. Hence, we performed a series of contextual inquiry, a focused field interview method that gathers data from users, to explore the context of where composite application design would have taken place and to understand the people, the process, and the tools who support this endeavor.
Due to the intermittent, lengthy, and collaborative nature of composite application design, it was impossible for us to observe the user's real work in the short time available to us. Thus we elicited retrospective accounts as a method to over come this constraint. During the interview, we probed the users' roles and involvement in composite application design related activities, the problems and challenges they dealt with, the applications and tools they used, whom else they worked with, and how they communicated with their collaborators. We also asked our participants to walk us through relevant documentation they created in their work process.
For each interview conducted, we used the contextual design method developed by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt and created the four work models: sequence model, flow model, cultural model, and artifact model. We also consolidated individual models into one coherent model for each of the four types of work models. These consolidated models informed us of a good generalization of the problem spaces and identify trends and common practices across different contexts.