SAP on visualising the future

As visual analytics architect in SAP’s User Experience team, John Armitage is responsible for creating designs and design concepts for SAP’s analytics products. In this article he talks about new and creative ways of displaying information.

“To demonstrate how current technological and market opportunities can transform how analytics are applied in the SAP product landscape, I launched two projects, LAVA and Pele.

I proposed LAVA as a user experience standard for analytic content in SAP products. The project began in 2011 as a team effort with Fred Samson of the SAP Experience Team. LAVA is best described as a method for analytic consumption. It makes analytics accessible to many more end-users, filling and expanding the role of traditional dashboards in the business intelligence landscape. It can be used as a stand-alone solution or for embedding within SAP products.
Simple and systematic, LAVA is intended to be low-cost, easily implemented, and widely applicable. State-of-the-art chart appearance, interaction, and scalability result from LAVA’s clean, practical visual language. Templates and components enable continuity of user experience and code across devices and products, and components are built to enable social collaboration, annotation, and closed loop scenarios.

Pele is a more experimental project conducted with SAP Research, combining navigational menus with charts into a visualization environment that users can explore. Pele is also a response to the challenge to demonstrate “immersive interaction with quantitative information”, and addresses the request by Andrew Murray, general manager, SAP Mobile Analytics, for an intuitive, proprietary data exploration experience on mobile devices. The result combines semantic navigation (via words) with spatial navigation (via screen areas representing quantities) to provide a fluid, intuitive, immersive experience of exploring a data set.”

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