CX Explorer
SAP CX • 2022
Getting a 360 degree view of the CX products, personas, user journeys and use cases.
Problem
The SAP Customer Experience (CX) ecosystem evolved through numerous strategic acquisitions over many years, creating a diverse portfolio spanning Sales, Service, Commerce, Data, Marketing, and cross-functional solutions. This growth, while expanding capabilities, led to significant fragmentation in user experience strategy. Each acquired team had independently developed their own persona frameworks, resulting in considerable duplication and overlap where business needs intersected. The proliferation of redundant personas—eventually exceeding 80 variations—created an unmanageable complexity that hindered cohesive experience design and diluted our understanding of core user needs.
Approach
This strategic initiative brought together an elite team of senior designers, project leads, and solution experts, with each member owning critical workstreams from persona development to user research. As a key contributor, I assumed responsibility for the crucial interface architecture that synthesized these diverse inputs into a cohesive system. My work created the connective tissue between customer insights and technical requirements, translating complex user needs into an intuitive design framework that served as the foundation for the entire project.
Outcome
The CX Explorer I designed revolutionized product teams understanding of customer engagement through its comprehensive 360-degree visualization of personas, use cases, customer journeys, and solution integrations. My system illuminated critical connections between previously siloed solution areas and highlighted overlapping personas, enabling strategic decision-making across the product ecosystem. The innovative spotlight visualization technique I created for representing complex persona relationships became the defining feature of the platform, drawing praise from stakeholders for its elegant simplicity and immediate clarity.
Process & Deliverables
🔎 What do customers say?
We conducted interviews with key customers across CX spanning sales, commerce, marketing and service to understand their user journeys and also the key personas for each touchpoint in the journey.
Based on these interviews, we were then able to refine the number of personas needed per sub solution area. In effect we were able to bring down the number of overlapping personas from 80+ to under 16 key personas that covered almost all key usecases.
🎨 Designing the CX Explorer
The initial goal was to design a prototype that could showcase all information relevant for the CX Explorer app, I needed to narrow down on the right framework that could do this job, without involving engineering. Essentially nocode tools.
Other important criteria was budget and time to deliver.
I started researching solutions such as SAP Storyboard, Microsoft Sway, open source tools like Webslides and even custom HTML was considered.
However most of these apps were highly opinionated or needed special requirements, such as hosting.
Finally, we decided on using Figma, as the team driving this were all designers and we could maintain this effectively, until the time we needed to convert this to a web app
🔦 But wait, how can we show the personas?
Having started work on screen design with Figma, we realised that personas needed to stand out, since this was the cornerstone of the CX Explorer.
As each sub solution area had similar personas, for instance, a marketing expert persona was relevant for both commerce and marketing solutions we needed a smart and engaging way to showcase this. So if a user wanted to see which personas overlapped between Sales and Service or Commerce and Marketing, we needed to find an unqiue way to show this.
I considered various visualisation options to how best represent this. But none seemed to scale based on user needs.
🎭 Setting the stage
Drawing inspiration from the theatrical origins of the word 'persona', I experienced a breakthrough moment that shaped the entire visualisation approach. This etymological connection sparked the spotlight concept—illuminating each character on our product stage with clarity and purpose, just as theater lighting reveals performers to an audience.
🎬 The CX Explorer
The spotlight visualization technique garnered enthusiastic acclaim from all stakeholders, earning particular recognition for its effectiveness with executive leadership while simultaneously defining the core interface architecture. By collaborating closely with senior stakeholders across multiple workstreams, I was able to contribute far beyond UI design—architecting the entire information structure and conceptual framework for a product whose final form was initially undefined. This ability to navigate ambiguity while driving both strategic direction and tactical execution ensured the solution's success, establishing a new benchmark for persona representation across the organization.