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2021/2022  KAN-CBUSV2035U  UX in Organizations (T)

English Title
UX in Organizations (T)

Course information

Language English
Course ECTS 7.5 ECTS
Type Elective
Level Full Degree Master
Duration One Semester
Start time of the course Spring
Timetable Course schedule will be posted at calendar.cbs.dk
Max. participants 120
Study board
BUS Study Board for BSc/MSc in Business Administration and Information Systems, MSc
Course coordinator
  • Torkil Clemmensen - Department of Digitalisation
Main academic disciplines
  • CSR and sustainability
  • Information technology
  • Business psychology
Teaching methods
  • Blended learning
Last updated on 03-02-2021

Relevant links

Learning objectives
  • 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
Course prerequisites
The course participants should have basic knowledge in interaction design and UX.
Prerequisites for registering for the exam (activities during the teaching period)
Number of compulsory activities which must be approved (see section 13 of the Programme Regulations): 2
Compulsory home assignments
1/ Mid-term deliverable: Description (max 5 page) of your research design for doing a study of your topic of interest (uploaded in DE).

Oral presentations etc.
2/ Oral presentations
Hand in a summary/slides of 3 presentations of ongoing design work. The presentations are given in class by the exam groups (min 2 people) and is about ongoing work analysis and design work.

Re take of both assignments
If a student cannot participate in one or two assignments due to documented illness, or if a student does not get the activities approved in spite of making a real attempt, then the student will be given one extra attempt before the ordinary exam. The extra attempt will be an individual written report of 10 pages on a topic assigned by the teacher, and this report will cover both mandatory activities.
Examination
UX in Organizations:
Exam ECTS 7,5
Examination form Oral exam based on written product

In order to participate in the oral exam, the written product must be handed in before the oral exam; by the set deadline. The grade is based on an overall assessment of the written product and the individual oral performance, see also the rules about examination forms in the programme regulations.
Individual or group exam Oral group exam based on written group product
Number of people in the group 2-5
Size of written product Max. 15 pages
Assignment type Report
Duration
Written product to be submitted on specified date and time.
20 min. per student, including examiners' discussion of grade, and informing plus explaining the grade
Grading scale 7-point grading scale
Examiner(s) Internal examiner and second internal examiner
Exam period Summer
Make-up exam/re-exam
Same examination form as the ordinary exam
Same as ordinary. Revision of report allowed, but changes should be clearly marked and communicated on front page.
Description of the exam procedure

The exam will be a group oral examination based on the written report and a set of sketches and prototypes. This entails that students must prepare a six page paper in the ACM format (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template) (equals 15 normal pages) and a set of sketches and prototypes that are based on the students analysis of work and organization.

Course content, structure and pedagogical approach

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. 

Description of the teaching methods
Most of the classes will be online.

This course aims to to be for students who consider doing their master thesis within an UX topic, or aim at a career as a UX professional or UX manager, or simply has a keen interest in the topic.

The course will apply a mixture of short lectures, group and class discussion based on presentations, blended learning with online feedback, and individual student group supervision.
Feedback during the teaching period
Feedback in provided as part of the teacher-student dialogue. Feedback is specifically given after each mandatory activity. Furthermore, all student presentations will be given feedback. Feedback is also possible to get during office hours.

More specifically:

Feedback on the mid-term deliverable is given during the course in the following four ways:
1. The teacher goes through the assignment in plenum at an exercise class so students can discuss their research design with examples
2. The teacher provides written feedback based on teacher-set criteria to the midterm deliverable
3. The teacher gives collective oral feedback on the assignment sets (online or offline)
4. The teacher registers that the presentation is passed/not passed for each student
The course responsible decides when to use what method.

Feedback on the oral presentations is given during the course in the following three ways:
1. The teacher gives verbal feedback during and after the students’ presentation in class: feedback is given in relation to the articles presented by the students and to the research project that they aim to make.
2. The teacher facilitates that the other students gives verbal feedback during and after the students’ presentation in class
3. The teacher registers that the presentation is passed/not passed for each student
Student workload
Lectures 24 hours
Prepare to class 48 hours
Contact to companies and Data collection 52 hours
Workshops (train use of tools) 24 hours
Exam and prepare 58 hours
Further Information

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

Expected literature

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.

 

Last updated on 03-02-2021