Students at Jönköping School of Engineering were given an assignment from Jönköping municipality, to evaluate their decision support system, QlikView. The students have also developed proposals for improvement with focus on usability.The Jönköpings municipality has currently got 11000 employees and consists of nine different administrations. The target group for QlikView is approximately 600 first-line managers.
The intention of QlikView is that the users can get an overall picture of their business by having all information in just one system.
The purpose of the thesis is to obtain a picture of what the users think about the system today and present relevant suggestions for improvement, which the Jönköping municipality can use when the introduction of the new version of QlikView takes place. The research questions that the study aims to answer are:
• Has QlikView got a user friendly interface?• How can the interface be improved to become more user friendly?
Theories that this work is based on is Jacob Nielsens ten usability principles and Ben Schneidermans eight golden rules. They are both well-known authors in the subject of interaction design. The thesis also deals with theories regarding how an evaluation should be performed and how you collect data in the most positive way.
The evaluation is started with a questionnaire that was sent out to the employees who had been logged into the system the past six months, the students also carried out interviews with 6 first-line managers. The result from the questionnaire and the interviews is presented in both diagrams, tables and in running text.
In the questionnaire, 44% of the respondents thought that the usability in QlikView was low. Opinions that stood out were that the selections are marked in an unclear way and that respondents found it difficult to know how to use the system.
The six interviewed persons agreed that they all wanted to have a search box instead of the search function that today is ”hidden”.
The suggested improvements that are presented are based on theories and result from the questionnaire and interviews.
The work ends with a discussion and a conclusion. The conclusion is that the Jönköping municipality should make some changes in terms of functions and layout to enhance the usability. The students hope that this work will help the Jönköping municipality in their new version of QlikView.