• Explain and reflect critically with the use of course literature on the idea of organizational usability and User eXperience (UX)
• Outline a plan for how to use UX approaches to create value for and empower the employee/customer/citizen
• Apply findings from empirical work on UX issues in the use of multiple organization-wide systems
• Describe and explain an UX issue with legacy systems (old systems)
• Develop and present a comprehensive set of documented and motivated prototypes, sketches, templates, running systems, or scripts that supports a targeted UX of a product, service, or system within or across organizations, and explain the principle idea behind these with the help of socio-technical design frameworks from the course literature

UX and usability builds on the principle of empowering the end-users of computers, so that they understand what is happening and can control the outcome and  experience positive emotions and well-being when interacting with computers. How does that principle unfold for UX in organizations? What changes when the user experience becomes the employee experience? How to understand and design for UX of algorithms and UX of artificial intelligence in the organizaion?

Traditionally, UX has been about an individual user’s experience of technology, which has often been the experience of consumer web stores and products such as smartphones. However, in this course we will follow a new trend and look at UX of digital workplace technologies in organizations.

Digital workplace technologies include the use of a wide range of devices such as mobile technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), wearable and self-tracking technologies. These technologies are contributing to a digital transformation of work into workplaces that go beyond time and place and promise to improve automations, evaluation, and facilitation of work processes. UX at work is constantly being reconfigured by organizational use of digital workplace technologies that are increasingly smarter e.g., as illustrated by the recent convenient inclusion of tools for communication (Skype) and sharing (OneDrive) in standard office software (MS Word), and by the emerging use of AI techniques in the digital workplace. Given Covid-19 crisis, we expect to face an explosion in innovations for the digital workplace. UX and employee experiences will however be crucial.

When we want to change and improve UX within and across organization, we may begin with exploring traditional organizational usability and UX. However, more than that is needed to design the employee experience. Taking business, managerial, organizational, and cultural views of UX allow for designs for different organizational levels from top management to employees. We may want to look at topics such as UX and interoperability, UX of legacy systems, and the concept of ‘end-user’ in organizations. All of this analysis and construction work we will integrate under the heading of‘design thinking management and support by applying socio-technical design frameworks from the literature.  

The cases that students select may for example be designing digital workplaces for specific work domains, interactions in networks of organizations, creating mini-hacks for appropriation of workflows, designing a novel part of the smart workplace, designing collaboration on big public screens, or other. The techniques and tools may include work and workplace analysis, interaction design, contextual personas, low fi prototypes, remote UX evaluation, and tools for data analysis.

The course consists of 24 lectures and 24 workshops that are organised in 12 sessions. Each session begins with lectures and is followed by workshops in the same room (if possible). There is one midterm online deliverable, which will be given online feedback. 

The course focus is on a classic socio-technical approach to notions of  "User Experience", "customer experience", "employee experience", etc.

The literature can be changed before the semester starts. Students are advised to find the final literature on Canvas before buying any material.

Books: Button, G., & Sharrock, W. (2009). Studies of Work and the Workplace in HCI: Concepts and Techniques. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics, 2(1), 1-96.​

Papers:

Abdelnour-Nocera, J., & Clemmensen, T. (2019). Theorizing About Socio-Technical Approaches to HCI. In B. R. Barricelli, V. Roto, T. Clemmensen, P. Campos, A. Lopes, F. Gonçalves, & J. Abdelnour-Nocera (Eds.), Human Work Interaction Design. Designing Engaging Automation (pp. 242–262). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Gruber, M., De Leon, N., George, G., & Thompson, P. (2015). Managing by design. Academy of Management Journal, 58(1), 1-7.​

Lu, Y., & Roto, V. (2015). Evoking meaningful experiences at work: A positive design framework for work tools. Journal of Engineering Design, Special issue on Interaction and Experience Design 26(4-6), pp. 99- 20.

Oscar Berg and Henrik Gustafsson. 2018. Digital Workplace Strategy & Design: A step-by-step guide to an empowering employee experience. BoD-Books on Demand.

Stefanie Harbich and Marc Hassenzahl. 2016. User Experience in the Work Domain: A Longitudinal Field Study. (2016). DOI:https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1093/​iwc/​iww022

Schaufeli, W. B., Salanova, M., González-Romá, V., & Bakker, A. B. (2002). The measurement of engagement and burnout: A two sample confirmatory factor analytic approach. Journal of Happiness Studies, 3(1), 71–92.