Bringing Numbers to Life

John Armitage is a strategic digital product designer and practice leader. During his 25-year career in the software industry, John has performed principal designer and team/practice leadership roles in consulting and development organizations for products in most major vertical markets and product architectures.John has studied and practiced design throughout his career. His specialty is to simplify otherwise complex or poorly understood business challenges, particularly those with an analytic or quantitative component, into elegant and coherent products that customers and users find appealing and useful. His foundational expertise in graphic design and the design thinking process infuse his work with timeless principles of aesthetics, usefulness, and practicality. His 10 years with business intelligence provider BusinessObjects, and then SAP, began with the creation of BOBJ's UX team in Paris, France and growing the practice to 20 designers worldwide. John made the business case for UX investment, introduced UX practice to the organization through training courses in all global dev centers, and integrated UX roles and deliverables into the product development lifecycle. In 2006 John's team designed one of the first chart-centric visual analytic product concepts, eventually productized as Visual Intelligence and now SAP's Lumira.During his final three years at SAP, John served in a research role to design next-generation solutions for visual analytic consumption. His visual analytic design language, codenamed LAVA, is being widely adopted across all SAP business units. Noted for it's radical simplicity and broad utility, LAVA positions SAP to bring practical, analytic decision-making to all areas of the enterprise.John creates value at all product levels, including basic design standards, new product features/versions, product concepts to inform business opportunities, and UX strategies for executives. He is hands-on and leads by example.