Creating User-Friendly Web Interfaces
A significant cost to a corporation is the training of its staff to use the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system effectively. Let's face it, SAP and other ERP systems are not the easiest systems to use-even a 'simple' sales order transaction can take a user through 10 or more screens. Users of this transaction must be taught not only the significance of all the fields that they view or change, but also the overall sales order process. And these training costs are not one-time expenses; if a person trained to perform a specific transaction changes jobs, a new person will need to be trained for the same transaction.
The high cost of training is one of the driving factors for moving some ERP functions and reports out to the intranet/Internet. Internet transactions must be intuitive enough for users to easily figure out. Thus when you write a Web interface into SAP, regardless of whether the interface is using Java or not, you must ensure that it is intuitive and will require either no training or very limited training.
Multimedia elements help to make Web transactions user-friendly. You should include items like the company's logo, pictures of products, or maps to service locations. Well-designed Web pages also rely heavily on forms and hyperlinks. Instead of asking customers to type in a product number, give them a choice of products with hyperlinks to click on.
Overall, you must keep the design and screen flow as simple as possible and keep in mind that the person using the Internet transaction may not be a trained professional SAP user. Some quick tips for creating your HTML pages follow.
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Determine who your likely audience will be and what problem they are trying to solve.
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Choose meaningful words or phrases for links.
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Keep pages short and avoid long waits for downloads of data or images (30 kilobytes is a good maximum size for a Web page).
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Preview your application/Web page on various systems before releasing it for general use.
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Graphics with a transparent background tend to look better than big block graphics.
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If users are likely to print out your page (for example, if it is some kind of report), give them a link so that they can see the whole report on one page (and hence get the whole printout with one click).
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Consider duplicating navigational headers at the bottom of your pages.
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Don't publish or display registered or company proprietary information for sites that are outside the firewall.
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Spell check your HTML pages.
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Date your pages.
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Don't put links to someone else's pages without first getting permission. (The page's owner may not want a link to their site.)
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Avoid publishing pages that are 'under construction.'
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