Umeå University's logo

In this thesis, the user interface design was developed for an internal website to help employees' competence development by getting them to attend more activities for competence development. Since it is generally up to the employee to develop their competence, they must be motivated. Therefore, this thesis aimed to design the website to motivate employees to search for, choose and participate in more competence development activities.

The method chosen to design this user interface consisted of 3 phases. The first phase consisted of a preliminary study to understand what motivated employees to apply for activities. This phase proved very important to the final design as most design decisions related to motivation were made during this phase. The second phase involved developing a LoFi prototype based on the preliminary study and refining it based on results from user tests conducted during this phase. The final phase involved designing and implementing a HiFi prototype in code based on the LoFi prototype and then testing the HiFi prototype for motivation.

The results from the HiFi prototype tests showed that the website's user interface motivated employees to search for, choose, and attend more activities for competence development. These results showed that the method used did yield good results. However, because many key findings from this motivation-focused preliminary study were related to usability, it is impossible to know how the results would differ if the preliminary study had focused on usability instead of motivation. Although it could not be concluded that the focus on motivation was necessary to achieve these results, it did seem to force the designer to understand users’ needs on a deeper level which could contribute to better results.