What’s New in SAP Fiori for the S/4HANA 2025 Release? (A UX Guide)
There’s a quiet revolution happening in the SAP user experience world. With the S/4HANA 2025 release, SAP has taken another decisive step in reshaping how people interact with enterprise systems.
This release brings major updates to the SAP Fiori user experience. For years, SAP users have lived between two worlds: the structured power of enterprise data and the fluid usability of modern web applications. The 2025 SAP Fiori experience for S/4HANA is where those worlds move closer together. The SAP Fiori 3 design system is centred on the Horizon visual theme, My Home enhancements, and now, even deeper integration with SAP Business AI and Joule.
This means a more consistent, intelligent, and unified user experience across S/4HANA Private Cloud and On-Premise.
This guide walks through the key UX innovations in SAP Fiori for the SAP S/4HANA 2025 and what they mean for consultants, UX designers, and SAP developers.
The Fiori 2025 Design Direction
When SAP first introduced the Horizon design language, it set the stage for a cleaner, more approachable interface across all SAP products. With the S/4HANA 2025 release, SAP continues to build on the Fiori 3 and Horizon theme family as its modern visual layer.
It offers a cleaner visual hierarchy and a focus on content, stronger cross-application and cross-platform alignment, and a deeper alignment with WCAG 2.2 at the framework level via SAPUI5.
Suggested Reading: SAP S/4HANA New Features
1. A More Fluid, Modern Visual Hierarchy
In the Horizon theme, SAP has refined colour balancing, spacing, and typography to create calmer and more focused layouts.
The theme supports high-contrast variants and theming options that help reduce eye strain and support accessibility, especially for long sessions.
- Tables and cards feel lighter and more content-centred
- Focus indicators are clearer, supporting keyboard users and accessibility
SAP refers to this direction as a move towards more purposeful, minimal interfaces: removing non-essential chrome so that business data and decisions are central.
2. Design Tokens and Cross-Platform Consistency
One of the most important architectural updates is the introduction of design tokens across the Fiori ecosystem. Design tokens are small, reusable building blocks that define things like colours, spacing, typography, and component behaviour in code. This means that the same design rules now apply consistently whether you’re building with SAPUI5, Fiori Elements, or custom web components.
Branding and theme changes can propagate across channels (web, mobile, SAP Start, Mobile Start) with fewer manual adjustments.
From a developer’s perspective, this finally eliminates the “almost Fiori, but not quite” look that used to appear in custom extensions. Whether your solution runs in a launchpad tile, on mobile, or inside a side-by-side extension, it will now visually align with SAP’s own core applications.
3. The User Focus: Less Chrome, More Content
SAP has also trimmed down the visual “chrome”, the borders, separators, and background elements that previously surrounded content. This shift gives more screen real estate to business data itself.
In simple terms: users see more of what matters and less of what doesn’t. Tables feel lighter, cards are more content-driven, and the overall rhythm of the UI feels faster and less cluttered.
The effect is straightforward: more screen space for business data, less noise.
Navigation, Launchpad, and Workspace Enhancements
If there’s one area where SAP has invested consistent effort since the early days of Fiori, it’s navigation.
1. A More Cohesive Launchpad Experience
The SAP Fiori launchpad remains the central entry point for all apps, with My Home as the primary start page in the 2025 release. Spaces still organise apps by business role, while pages structure the content within those roles. On top of that, the new My Home experience and the Recommended Apps feature use usage data to surface frequently used and relevant apps and tasks for each user.
For example, if you’re a finance consultant who regularly moves between analytics, approvals, and reporting, My Home can bring those tools together on a single, role-aware start page instead of scattering them across multiple tiles and groups.
It feels less like launching isolated apps and more like moving between focused work modes.
2. Unified Search and Notifications
The SAP Fiori launchpad continues to provide a unified entry point for search and notifications across SAP S/4HANA. Enterprise Search delivers type-ahead suggestions, relevance-based ranking, and structured result lists, helping users quickly find business objects and related actions. These capabilities are part of the established Fiori experience and continue to evolve as the underlying search models improve.
Notifications remain closely integrated with workflow and task management and can be surfaced in the launchpad as well as in SAP Mobile Start.
Developers can expose custom notifications and workflow tasks using the existing notification framework and the Unified Inbox, enabling a consistent experience across standard and custom applications.
3. Cross-System UX and Navigation
One of the most important shifts in the 2025 SAP UX landscape is how navigation now extends beyond a single system. SAP is gradually moving from a world of isolated launchpads to a connected ecosystem where applications from different SAP products share a consistent Horizon experience and a common entry point.
At the centre of this is SAP Start. Instead of treating S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, or Concur as separate destinations, SAP Start brings them together into a unified launch experience.
From a user’s perspective, it feels less like switching systems and more like moving between domains of work, such as supplier management, finance, procurement, and HR, all accessed through a coherent, familiar interface.
Behind the scenes, this is powered by federated content. The S/4HANA 2025 Fiori launchpad can expose its tiles, cards, insights, and tasks to SAP Start or SAP Build Work Zone, while preserving theming, identity, and navigation behaviour. Users don’t need to think about authentication, URLs, or environments. They simply open a task or card, and the context follows them no matter where the data lives: in S/4HANA, BTP, or another cloud solution.
For hybrid landscapes, this consistency is crucial. A user reviewing an invoice in SAP Start may open a detail view in S/4HANA, jump into a supplier record in Ariba, and return to My Home without breaking the visual or navigational flow. The Horizon theme, design tokens, identity services, and intent-based navigation work together to make the transitions feel seamless.
4. Unified Theming Across Deployment Models
SAP is deprecating older themes, such as Belize and Blue Crystal and moving customers to Horizon-based themes across landscapes.
Benefits include:
- Single theming strategy for S/4HANA on-premise and cloud
- Easier brand maintenance via Theme Designer and design tokens
- Consistent user experience across SAP Start, SAP Mobile Start, and Fiori launchpads
5. AI-Assisted UX. The Subtle Layer Beneath
SAP’s digital assistant Joule is becoming a consistent presence across SAP Start, SAP Mobile Start, and S/4HANA Cloud. From a Fiori perspective, this adds a subtle AI layer to the user journey rather than redesigning the interface. Users can trigger Joule from their entry point, retrieve insights, ask for summaries, or receive recommended actions in scenarios such as finance or supply chain.
These capabilities are powered by AI Foundation and Business Data Cloud, enabling context-aware assistance without altering the underlying Fiori design system.
Developer & Tooling Enhancements to Build Smarter
Beneath the user-facing improvements of S/4HANA 2025 lies a steady evolution in how SAP developers build the Fiori experience. SAP isn’t introducing entirely new frameworks here; instead, it’s reinforcing a development model that matches modern engineering practices while staying true to enterprise governance.
1. Fiori Elements. Richer Templates on OData V4
If you’ve ever built a Fiori Elements app, you know the drill: annotate your CDS view, define a few manifest settings, and the framework handles most of the UI logic for you.
SAP Fiori elements continues to evolve as the main model-driven UI framework on top of OData V4:
- Extended annotation support for advanced OData V4 features (e.g., parameterised entities, draft handling, and side effects).
- Flexible page layouts and sections that allow developers to blend template and freestyle areas.
- Better support for analytical patterns in list/object pages
What’s powerful about this update is how it aligns with the new Clean Core principle: put business logic into ABAP (RAP/CDS/OData), then let Fiori elements generate UX with minimal custom JavaScript.
In short, you write less code, but you get richer behaviour.
As a consultant, I see this bridging the gap between functional configuration and full-stack extension, letting smaller teams deliver faster without introducing technical debt.
2. SAP Fiori Tools in VS Code and SAP Business Application Studio
SAP Fiori tools remain the central toolset for building Fiori elements and freestyle SAPUI5 apps in VS Code and SAP Business Application Studio.
Key benefits include:
- Integrated Fiori Application Generator for rapid scaffolding of apps, extensions, or OData services.
- Annotation Modeller, offering a visual interface for OData V4 annotations directly within VS Code.
- Smart Preview that renders real Fiori pages with live or mock data, often removing the need for a separate FLP sandbox during development.”
- Integrated LSP (Language Server Protocol) for auto-completion, validation, and syntax linting across XML, CDS, and manifest files.
As SAP continues to invest in VS Code-based development (also visible with ABAP Cloud extensions announced around TechEd 2025), this brings SAP and non-SAP development workflows closer together.
This means developers can finally use the same editor for Fiori, CAP, and Node.js projects, and unify the SAP and non-SAP developer experience.
3. AI Assisted Developer Experience (Early Stage)
SAP is rolling out AI-powered assistance for developers via AI Foundation and its Generative AI Hub, including tools such as the Prompt Optimiser (introduced at TechEd 2025).
The Prompt Optimiser helps developers generate boilerplate annotations, mock UI text, microcopy, or layout structures by describing the desired outcome in plain language.
You can, for instance, type:
“Create a list report showing overdue invoices with conditional formatting and an approval action.”
And the assistant will scaffold the annotations and layout structure for you. It’s context-aware, meaning it understands your project metadata and recommends actions that align with your data model.
As these capabilities mature and integrate with SAP Build Code, SAP Business Application Studio, and related tooling, they are expected to significantly speed up Fiori development.
Watch this video to see the prompt optimiser in action.
Integrations and Mobile UX
Mobile is increasingly a natural extension of SAP’s UX story, and in 2025, this becomes even more cohesive. SAP Mobile Start remains the primary mobile entry point for accessing SAP applications, notifications, tasks, and insights from S/4HANA and other cloud solutions.
What matters most is the visual and functional alignment. Mobile Start uses the Horizon visual theme, the same design language used in the SAP Fiori launchpad on desktop. That means users transitioning from a laptop to a phone no longer feel like they’re entering a different world: the structure, layout, and terminology remain consistent.
This continuity is especially visible in areas like:
- Notifications, which mirror the same task streams users see on the desktop
- Tiles and cards, which adapt gracefully from web to mobile
- S/4HANA insights, which can appear as mobile widgets or deep links
- Launch content, provided through federated services, ensuring consistency across systems
For many organisations, the real value lies in how Mobile Start becomes an extension of day-to-day operations, such as approvals, alerts, KPIs, and navigation, that happen anywhere without users needing to understand the underlying landscape.
Mobile doesn’t replace the desktop launchpad, but it mirrors its logic and appearance, providing a unified UX across devices.
This coherence is essential in a world where business workflows rarely stay confined to a desk. SAP’s direction here is deliberate: same theme, same navigation patterns, same identity model, just delivered through a different form factor.
What This Release Doesn’t Solve (Yet)
Even with the UX advances in S/4HANA 2025, several structural challenges remain:
- Legacy SAP GUI migration: Moving highly customised GUI transactions to Fiori remains a project in itself. Tools (Fiori elements, RAP, adaptation) help, but there is no automatic (one-click) conversion for decades of custom code.
- Performance of very large analytical apps: Performance still depends heavily on data modelling, infrastructure and network conditions. Despite improvements, complex analytical apps with millions of records can still struggle with response times, particularly in on-premise environments with limited infrastructure investment.
- Change management and training: Modern workspace concepts (spaces/pages, My Home, Mobile Start) require structured enablement for business users.
These aren’t deal-breakers, but they’re realities that implementation teams need to plan for. Recognising these points helps set realistic expectations.
Suggested Reading:
Typical Challenges in Adopting SAP Fiori as the SAP GUI
How to Convert Your Frequently Used SAP GUI Transactions into Fiori Apps
Closing Thoughts. The Future of SAP UX and What Comes Next for Fiori
When I look at the SAP Fiori experience in the 2025 S/4HANA release, I see a shift in how SAP and its customers think about enterprise UX.
For years, the goal was to catch up: to close gaps in design consistency, usability, or tooling. Today, the direction is different. With the continued evolution of the Fiori 3 design system, the Horizon visual theme, My Home, TypeScript-enabled development, and AI-assisted interactions through Joule, SAP is building UX as a platform capability.
Moreover, the technical maturity of this landscape gives us confidence that what we build today will age cleanly, upgrade safely, and integrate more naturally with the rest of the SAP environment.
If you’re a developer, this is the moment to modernise your approach: TypeScript, VS Code, and Fiori elements for OData V4 are now mainstream.
If you’re a UX designer, the Horizon design system gives you a scalable, consistent language that works across systems and form factors: design once, deploy everywhere.
And if you’re a consultant, you have a stronger case than ever that UX is not decorative. It is structural. It is strategic. It is central to adoption, productivity, and clean-core transformation.
Useful links:
https://help.sap.com/doc/e2048712f0ab45e791e6d15ba5e20c68/2025/en-US/FSD_OP2025_latest.pdf
https://avotechs.com/blog/technical-sap-news-trends-that-have-a-significant-impact-on-companies/
