Bachelor's Thesis René Milzarek

Motivation

The Siemens AG as Europe's largest electronics and electrical engineering company has to cope with the human resource management of 475.000 employees.¹ Therefore an enterprise webapplication provides the executives with the functionality to centrally decide on approval processes (e.g. approval of leave, payed overtime or special payment) for employees under their responsibility. This webapplication has the benefit of collecting the approval processes from several, over the time grown, seperate applications to provide a single point of charge.

This thesis examines in cooperation with the Siemens AG how this application could be enriched by innovative usability concepts through the developement of a prototypical native iOS-application for the iPad. Furthermore it's evaluated, if the dynamic visualization of human resource KPIs could support the executives in their decision making process. Therefore psychological concepts of visual information processing, as well as patterns and anti-patterns for information visualization through charts get examined and compared to the actual executives' requirements.

Goals

This work aims to analyse the added value of innovative usability concepts realized by the development of a mobile application in the case of the previous mentioned webapplication. Besides that the demand and appropriate visualization of human resource KPIs should be figured out. These concepts should be conveyed by a prototypical iOS-application for the iPad and conclusively evaluated by several usability interviews with the executives. 

Approach

• Identify usability and visualization concepts by...
• ... the evaluation of the existing webapplication and usability investigations
• ... the exploratory research in literature
• Collect information about the existing webapplication (e.g. interface documentation), the end-user (statistic of mobile device distribution) and corporate guidelines (e.g. design guidelines)
• Create and carry out a survey for the executives to...
• ... charaterize the end-users and their usage patterns in detail
• ... raise and priotize their requirements
• Evaluate the survey results
• Create mockups for the prototype and gather feedback
• Implement a prototypical iOS-application for the iPad
• Run several interviews with executives to examine the usability experience of the prototype
• Analyse the added value on the basis of the interviews

Results

• Usability concepts and evaluations with the focus on mobile devices
• Visualization concepts for KPIs and general (anti-) patterns for chart visualizations
• Prototypical iOS-application for the iPad
• Analysis of the added value and a conclusion for the future development of a mobile client

Final presentation

References

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=agxq4nZkE.lc&refer=germany (last accessed on 16.09.2013)