Skill Management System
I worked with an international technical inspection and certification provider in Germany to design a skill management system for its ~20 000 internal and external inspectors — matching certified experts to inspection tasks based on their qualifications. Before this project, qualification data lived in decentralized spreadsheets and paper records across dozens of departments.
I owned the technical skills section of the inspector profile and the application process end to end, designed and conducted usability testing for the entire platform across all three user roles. I also contributed to personal data, skill search, and reporting, alongside a second UX designer who held primary ownership there.
To protect privacy and confidentiality, all logos, company names, and other identifying details have been removed or replaced. These adaptations ensure compliance with privacy agreements and safeguard sensitive information.
challenge
No reliable source of truth
Qualification data was scattered across spreadsheets, paper records, and a legacy SAP system — nobody had a current, trustworthy overview of who was certified for what.
High manual effort
Managing certifications by hand, department by department, was slow, inconsistent, and error-prone.
Low process transparency
Outdated or missing qualification records caused audit delays and quality issues across departments.
Confusing legacy interface
The existing system was difficult to navigate and required a user manual just to complete routine tasks.
solution
From scattered records to one traceable system
A centralized, global solution built on SAP BTP, with a unified database. Designed using the SAP Fiori Horizon design system to ensure consistency with existing SAP ecosystem. Key features included:
Inspector profile
A single view of qualification and experience data — inspectors track status and progress, managers get review and approval controls, without maintaining separate interfaces.
Inspector skill search
Find qualified inspectors by skill, replacing manual lookups across scattered spreadsheets and records.
Guided application process
A step-by-step flow for requesting or updating a qualification.
Eliminating manual workarounds
Replaced email chains and disconnected tracking with a single guided, traceable system — end to end.
design
Technical Skills
I designed the Technical Skills section, covering all the activities tied to an inspector's qualifications. The same underlying data served two audiences: inspectors saw their qualification status and related activities, while managers got the controls needed to monitor and review records. Horizontal scrolling in the tables was unavoidable given the volume and complexity of the data, so I moved less-used fields into configurable table settings — reducing what each role had to scan without cutting anything they might still need.
Pictured above: technical skills mockup
Application process
The legacy process had six separate application types, partially digital and partially offline, handled through popups and a separate page. We consolidated them into two: new application, for an inspector applying for a skill for the first time, and qualification update, for changes to one they already held. Case-specific details that used to define a separate type became fields collected within one flow.
Pictured above: applications in legacy system — user manual
The old system handled applications through a series of popups and a separate page — fine for something short like monitoring, but consolidated applications ended up having more steps and more conditional detail, and popups gave no sense of structure or progress. I moved applications into a dedicated multi-page wizard instead. Usability testing confirmed participants completed applications without instructions, a direct contrast to a legacy system that required a manual. Once submitted, inspectors could track status and approver comments directly in the system, and approvers worked from a centralized worklist, with every step traceable on both sides.
Pictured above: applications mockup
Pictured above: application worklists mockup
usability testing
Structure worked. Language and feedback didn't
I designed and conducted usability testing across all three user roles — Approver, Manager, Inspector — with 6 participants completing 4 core tasks each, including a mix of participants with more and less experience of the previous paper-based process.
Pictured above: usability testing notes
Pictured above: skill search mockups
Participants with longer experience of the legacy process stumbled most on terminology. I renamed those terms to match the language participants actually used. A second recurring gap: actions like approving an application or adding a monitoring entry gave no confirmation that anything had happened, so participants weren't sure if their action went through. I added toast notifications at those points to close the gap.
Structure and navigation held up well across all three roles — participants moved through the core flows without needing instructions, and the table organization was consistently well received.
reflection
Alignment I'd front-load next time
Real requirements kept surfacing after we'd already sunk time into designs. Process owners weren't part of our reviews from the start — their time was limited early on — but midway through the project, it became clear that skipping them wasn't sustainable. Once I made those check-ins a habit instead of a one-off, we caught department-level gaps before they turned into rework.
Usability testing reinforced who the system actually had to work for. The friction points that mattered — terminology, missing confirmation — were exactly the kind of thing a stakeholder workshop wouldn't have surfaced, but six users moving through real tasks did.
Next Project
Helix — Digital Ecosystem
© 2026 Daria Behrens