Designing SAP Fiori Applications: UX Principles and Modern UI Trends

Learn more about the core design principles of SAP Fiori applications and check tips on how to tailor effective and user-friendly Fiori apps.

SAP Fiori is a next-gen UX system created and evolved by SAP that integrates fundamental user experience principles such as simplicity, consistency, intuitiveness, and role-based design. SAP Fiori applications deliver efficient and engaging experiences that enable users to perform tasks quickly and easily without steep learning curves or change resistance.

The simplicity and increased usability of SAP Fiori apps are achieved thanks to the adherence to clearly defined design guidelines and consistent patterns across applications, which ensures predictability, coherence, and streamlined workflows.

In this post, we’ll discuss SAP Fiori design guidelines, discuss how to effectively create appealing and easy-to-use Fiori applications, and discuss the existing and anticipated design trends for app UI development.

Introduction to SAP Fiori Design

SAP Fiori is SAP’s design language and UX platform, created to streamline and enhance the usability of enterprise software. Launched initially to improve traditional SAP interfaces, Fiori has evolved significantly, placing users at the center of software design and emphasizing ease-of-use, productivity, and a visually appealing interface. The primary goal of Fiori is to deliver simplicity and coherence across applications, significantly improving user productivity and satisfaction.

To stay aligned with evolving UI trends, SAP Fiori continually adopts modern interface elements and technologies, such as minimalistic and flat design principles, responsive layouts, conversational interfaces, micro-interactions, and embedded analytics. By embracing personalization options and integrating AI-driven features, SAP Fiori continuously adapts to user preferences and industry requirements, ensuring that enterprise applications remain visually appealing, accessible, and effective.

SAP Fiori Core Design Principles 

SAP Fiori’s advantage is simplicity; the same goes for its core design principles, matching the identity and philosophy of Fiori. Because writing thousand-page scripts of rules would be overwhelming and redundant, everything is based on five distinct precepts:

• Role-based: SAP Fiori designs interfaces specifically tailored to the roles and needs of individual users, ensuring that every person only sees the relevant functionality necessary for their tasks.
• Simple: Fiori interfaces focus on essential information, reducing complexity and eliminating unnecessary interactions to minimize communication paths and streamline effort.
• Coherent: Unified design patterns and coherent experiences across all SAP Fiori applications enhance predictability, reduce user cognitive load, and streamline the learning of new applications.
• Adaptive: SAP Fiori interfaces adapt across devices, ensuring seamless experiences whether users interact with the system via desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
• Delightful: User journeys are designed based on user research and iterative testing to ensure intuitive navigation and minimal learning curves.

These simple principles allow developers and designers to tailor usable and compatible custom SAP Fiori applications to satisfy various business needs.

Elements of the SAP Fiori Design System

To ensure consistent application of UX principles, SAP provides detailed design guidelines, supported by the SAP Fiori Design System. This comprehensive approach ensures a high-quality, consistent, and inclusive user experience across diverse business scenarios and user groups, facilitating faster SAP adoption, improved productivity, and long-term user satisfaction.

SAP Fiori design guidelines

Fiori design guidelines are broadly applicable across all SAP Fiori applications, regardless of the industry and operational purpose for which the app is created. Designers, developers, and product teams consistently reference these guidelines during application development.

Clearly documented guidelines help designers and developers implement UX principles in a structured manner, ensuring consistency, predictability, and efficiency by offering precise instructions, patterns, and best practices. This approach helps minimize guesswork, speed up development, and maintain high-quality user experiences across diverse enterprise scenarios.

SAPUI5 controls libraries

SAPUI5 control libraries can be used directly in development scenarios. They provide pre-built, reusable UI components such as buttons, tables, forms, and navigation elements. They are essential for developers building standardized SAP Fiori applications.

Using SAPUI5 controls significantly reduces development time and cost by leveraging tested and consistent components. These libraries ensure app unity, streamline maintenance, and guarantee responsiveness and compatibility across devices and platforms. Besides, SAPUI5 control libraries allow for maintaining the integrity and coherence of the user experience, offering users familiar, predictable environments without steep learning curves.

Design tokens and themes

Design tokens and ready-made themes are typically applied when branding consistency, customization, and flexibility are critical. An example of this is when an enterprise needs to align SAP Fiori applications with its corporate identity standards.

Design tokens enable quick customization of UI attributes, such as color schemes, fonts, spacing, and visual style, without compromising overall UX coherence. This allows organizations to effortlessly align SAP Fiori apps with their brand books, quickly implement theme updates, and maintain visual consistency. The ability to swiftly adapt visual designs to changing business needs ensures prolonged system lifetime and reduces ongoing maintenance overhead.

Accessibility and inclusive design

Accessibility principles are relevant to all SAP Fiori applications. They offer inclusive design to accommodate diverse users’ needs and help build borderless app systems that are user-friendly to everyone.

Adhering to accessibility standards like WCAG ensures SAP Fiori applications remain inclusive, usable, and compliant with global accessibility regulations. Inclusive design broadens the application's audience and enhances usability for all users by implementing clear, intuitive interactions. Accessibility compliance strengthens corporate responsibility, reduces legal risk, and ensures that enterprise systems provide equitable user experiences for every employee.

SAP Fiori and Modern UI Trends

SAP Fiori has made significant progress since 2013 and continues evolving to stay tuned to contemporary UI trends. Incorporating modern tendencies ensures that SAP Fiori applications stay aligned with user expectations and technological advancements.

• Minimalism and flat design: Besides being modern and aesthetically appealing, minimalistic SAP Fiori interfaces emphasize clarity, readability, and visual simplicity, which helps avoid user frustration.
• Micro-interactions and animations: SAP Fiori utilizes subtle animations and interactive feedback mechanisms, which enhance the user’s sense of control and engagement and prevent interaction from being monotonous.
• Dark mode and personalization: Accommodating personalization trends, SAP Fiori supports user preferences, such as dark mode, enabling comfort, accessibility, and greater user control over the application environment.

How LeverX Can Help With SAP Fiori

As an SAP Gold Partner and Strategic Supplier, LeverX can help you develop and implement any type of SAP Fiori application, be it a single module or a whole corporate ecosystem. Our team of experts is always here to help you transform your business processes and simplify your daily routine with modern, user-friendly Fiori interfaces.

LeverX offers 24/7 customer support and user training assistance to ensure smooth technology adoption and further digital transformation of your business. Contact us for an expert consultation on how to tailor SAP Fiori to fit your company's operations and processes.

Tips for Designing Effective SAP Fiori Applications

SAP Fiori design is functional and straightforward, so it should not be overcomplicated when developing Fiori applications. Instead, consider the following points to effectively harness SAP Fiori when designing robust, user-friendly applications.

• Understand the context and needs: Conduct user research and identify user roles and workflows before starting the SAP Fiori development process. This will help you tailor design solutions catering to users’ needs and not impose frustration.
• Prioritize simplicity and functionality: Focus SAP Fiori designs strictly on the necessary features that clearly communicate key tasks, avoid cluttering the UI, and don’t add hypothetical needs. This will prevent adoption challenges and speed up routine processes.
• Use standard components and patterns: Leverage existing SAPUI5 components and SAP Fiori floorplans to ensure coherence, reliability, and accelerated development. Unjustified customization may lead to compatibility issues and additional development overhead.
• Test regularly: Validate SAP Fiori designs with real users to measure effectiveness and apply feedback. Timely tests and validation will help you create applications that will be helpful and easy to use, not just visually appealing.
• Consider performance and responsiveness: Optimize SAP Fiori applications’ performance to ensure smooth, responsive experiences across all platforms and devices to provide employees with access to necessary data from any location.

Conclusion

SAP Fiori has transformed how users interact with SAP applications by delivering a highly intuitive, responsive, and user-centric experience. The alignment with contemporary UI and UX design principles and consistent integration of emerging technologies empowers users to leverage SAP Fiori to seamlessly accomplish tasks and confidently make data-driven decisions.

SAP Fiori will keep evolving as time goes by and trends change, but its core principles — usability, simplicity, and user-friendliness — will remain constant. We hope this guide was helpful for SAP Fiori developers, designers, and existing and future Fiori users. Feel free to contact LeverX for professional assistance in designing Fiori applications.