Engaging Skeptics in Using a New Employee Engagement Software, Iterating on interaction design aspects of an Employee Engagement Software to reduce the risk of user resistance

Sammanfattning

Many companies of today have realized the importance of measuring what is called Employee Engagement (EE) in order to give the employees a fulfilling and positive work experience. Employee Engagement Softwares (EES) are tools that help the Human Resources (HR) department to track and measure the employees’ well-being and work satisfaction. This study will focus on a newly developed EES application prototype called Vibee. When implementing a new software there is always a risk of user resistance and this topic has not been the main focus in the earlier development of this application. Literature provides general guidelines on what to think about to reduce the risk of user resistance, but not specifically for the field of interaction design when developing an Employee Engagement Software application. Taking a Research Through Design approach, utilizing methods from the 5 Stages in the Design Thinking Process, the aim of this study is to contribute to the field by bridging the existing gap in literature, i.e. the lack of guidelines available for interaction designers when designing an Employee Engagement Software (EES) with a focus on minimizing the risks of user resistance. Hence, the research question of this thesis reads: What guidelines can be provided for designing a new Employee Engagement Software aimed to engage everyone, including skeptics?. In order to reach an answer to our research question, another aim is to provide a deliverable in the form of a new iteration of the Vibee prototype. The project resulted in a high fidelity prototype as well as a compilation of seven guidelines to be used for interaction designers to take into consideration when developing an EES application.