Making an Internship Management System More Usable - A Usability Study for An Internship Management System

Abstract

Praktikplatsen.se is an internship management system that is used by schools, businesses and Göteborgsregionens Kommunalförbund (GR) to provide and manage internships for students of all ages. The team who handles the tool, has a support section in the system which is frequently used by many of the users. They want to reduce the amount of support errands, which is why they have requested an analysis of the system to find usability problem and design suggestions on how to improve it. With the problem in mind, this study aims to make Praktikplatsen.se more usable for school administrators who experienced the most usability problems of all the users. The thesis proposes a list of problems that have been found and solutions to the them which are presented in the form of guidelines and a high-fidelity prototype shown as screenshots in this report. In order to accomplish this, the project was divided into two phases, one research and analysis part to identify the usability problems, and one design and evaluation part to develop a good solution to the problems. The first phase consisted of user research methods and data analysis to collect data. The data was then evaluated with the KJ method and experience mapping to get a list of critical usability problems. Further, the results from the first phase was used in the next phase to design solutions. The design was first made in the form of a low-fidelity prototype which was evaluated with usability testing and then re-designed into a high-fidelity prototype. Evaluation methods were used after each design step to refine and finalize the prototypes. This resulted in a design that is very close in “look and feel” as the end product.