User Experience (UX) design is the process of creating products that adequately meet users’ needs and result in user satisfaction. In the context of software development, the application of UX design practices has been linked to increased profitability in organisations. Despite the financial benefit organisations stand to gain by adopting UX design practices, previous studies have revealed a low rate of adoption. One key source of resistance to the adoption UX design practices is the perception that adding new steps to an organisation’s software development process would prolong delivery timelines unnecessarily. Such resistance is compounded by the fact that a high proportion of software development projects already exceed their planned durations. The question therefore arises on how the UX design process can be optimised so that it has the least amount of impact on the speed of delivering software. It is this very question that this study answers. In this study, the UX design processes from four case study organisations and six prominent international UX design approaches were reviewed and analysed. From these analyses, commonalities and optimisation opportunities were identified for each process, then synthesised into a proposed framework. This study’s contribution to the Human-Computer Interaction body of knowledge is the proposed Graduated UX Design Adoption (gUXa) framework. The Innovation Resistance Theory (IRT) was used to explain the ability of the gUXa framework to reduce the barrier to UX process adoption due to its potential to optimise the design process for timeous systems development. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Informatics / MCom / Unrestricted

The worldwide crisis, Covid-19 had a tremendous influence on education system. Many higher education systems forced to change into emergency online education while challenges and problems facing in online learning process affected not only students’ population but also lots of teachers. Video conferencing tools as a technology which help users to have virtual meetings need to be effective and user friendly to provide the learning process with the same quality as face-to-face education. The goal of this study is researching about one of the important problems in online learning process which is teachers-students interaction. The primary goal of this research is to find the pain points in students-teachers interaction and students’ motivation and our secondary goal is investigating the effects of this interaction on students’ motivation and providing a solution in video conferencing tools to solve this issue using a prototype. We are using mixed methodology which is including both quantitative and qualitative methodology. Collected data from existing studies and literature review, surveys, and interview are methods which are used. Based on our research questions and the methodology for collecting data the following are studied: 1. The pain points and challenges regarding teachers’ interaction and students’ motivation in online learning 2. The effects of students-teachers interaction in students’ motivation 3. The features in video conferencing tools which can improve this interaction. All the findings present in a prototype using Figma with the goal of improving user experience of video conferencing tools for online learning purpose and solve existing problems. This prototype presented to students and teachers to get their feedbacks through an interview. With the importance of online learning in the future education, more research is needed to explore other aspects which has effect on students’ motivation and presenting other solution or features or using another research methods will bring more value to this subject.

Even before the spread of COVID-19 video conferencing software has seen a steady rise in use. Due to their convenient way of offering a way of seeing the other participants live while talking to them, it is quite easy to see why this kind of software became more and more used throughout the years. Now, during the pandemic, video conferencing software is more used than ever before, especially in learning environments. Nevertheless, studies show that student engagement is rather low with university students who take part in online learning. Throughout this paper, we venture into discovering the reasons behind this lack of engagement and how it can be improved from a User Experience Design standpoint. With findings resulted from several previous studies and identified student problems and needs from those papers we created a prototype to test which features and design elements affected student engagement.