Human in Technology USE Pathway

Three Consecutive Tu/e Electives

The pathway I chose has to do with psychology in combination with technology. This is mainly due to my identity, I have an interest in human behaviour and their complex mind. During this course for example I learned about the adoption of technology model and am more knowledgeable on human interaction with machines.

The most interesting about this learn path was the third and final course, were we needed to do a group project in a multidisciplinary team for a real company. The outcomes for me were an eye opener to how important the job of a good User Interface designer is:

We analysed the following question about the intention:
"I will probably use the Netwerkapp."
"I intend to use the Netwerkapp."
"I think it is useful to use the Netwerkapp."

The result from these questions is that visitors who visited the event because they want to expand their network have no more intention to use the Netwerkapp than visitors who visited the event for other reasons. That means that our hypothesis is proven incorrect. The answer to the research question is that the visitors of an event who have as main reason to expand their network do not have a higher intention to use the Netwerkapp than visitors that came to the event with other reasons in mind.
We also analysed the questions in the categories “perceived usefulness” and “ease of use”. The result of one question was remarkable; the question “I can easily ask questions and thus am able to find what I was looking for” in the category “perceived usefulness”. On a scale of 1 to 5, the mean for people who visit the event to expand their network is 1.78, while the mean for the other people is 2.50.
This result shows that the perceived usefulness of the Netwerkapp is less for people that attend the event for networking than for people that attend the event for other reasons.

The outcome is something I saw from just opening the app for the first time, it was badly designed. And for the first time I understood how powerful User-Interface design can be.