A graduation student is wanted from the DFI (designing for interaction) program to work at Exact.

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Title of the Graduation Project:               

The “New” Bookkeeping: Applying Generation Y Interactions into an Office Context

Starting Date:

Beginning of April 2012

Introduction:

A new workforce named Generation Y (born between 1980-2000) is currently entering the job market. Being the first generation of digital natives, they grew up with highly interactive tools, applications and technologies, such as mobile phones, mp3 players and multi-touch tablets. This generation has grown accustomed to new, more expressive and natural ways of interacting with their tools (e.g. shake an iPhone to shuffle songs) in the private context of their home or friends. In the more public work context, however, the richer ways of interacting that these new technologies offer, do not seem to be supported yet. As a consequence, most of the interactions with office applications and tools are still done through the ubiquitous, almost 40-year old, set-up of keyboard, display and mouse. Therefore, a design challenge presents itself in bringing these new Generation Y type of interactions into the work context.

This project is affiliated with Wei Liu’s PhD project on “Supporting Generation Y Interactions in Office Work”, which is a collaboration between the ID-StudioLab and Exact. Exact (exact.com) is a business software developer located in Delft. Research done so far on interaction qualities and design guidelines will guide the student to start this graduation project.

Problem Definition:

In current office contexts, traditional ways of interacting with tools still dominate how Generation Y is conducting their work, i.e. calling a colleague urgently without knowing his/her availability at the moment. One of these contexts is bookkeeping in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), which are the target customers of Exact. In these SME’s, Exact Online, a web-based accounting application, is used to do bookkeeping in collaboration between entrepreneurs and their accountants. Usually one accountant provides service to multiple entrepreneurs, especially to the zzp’er (one man company). Opposite to the rich interactions that these entrepreneurs experience in the home context, the bookkeeping activity is often performed following the rigid structure of the traditional office tools. To improve this situation, novel, Generation Y interaction styles need to be introduced to the act of bookkeeping.

Assignment:

The goal of this project is to explore, design and integrate novel, Generation Y interaction styles within the context of bookkeeping for SME’s. The target users are entrepreneurs and their accountants. Research on the existing bookkeeping procedures and the roles of and communication between entrepreneur and accountants needs to be conducted to map the current context. Following this research, future scenarios of use will be developed, based on which design concepts will be generated. One concept will be worked out into a prototype or simulation.

Results:

1. A prototype or simulation
2. A final report
3. A1 poster
4. An oral presentation

Planning:

Note: The student should fill in this section.