Usability Of The PS Recruitingportal 2.1: Qualitative Research

To shed light on the research problem of this paper, three research questions were formulated:
1) Which weaknesses regarding usability does the PS Recruitingportal 2.0 show from the user’s point of view?
2) How does the current usability of the PS Recruitingportal 2.0 impact the users’ willingness to work with it?
3) What other factors do users perceive have an impact on their willingness to work with the PS Recruitingportal 2.0?
As it was found that neither a qualitative nor a quantitative research is adequate to fully address this paper’s research questions, the author decided to adopt a mixed methods research.
Johnson/Onwuegbuzie/Turner (2007) define mixed methods research as “[…] the type of research in which a researcher or team of researchers
This implies that a mixing of both researches occurs, when the data analysis of the first phase is connected with the data collection of the quantitative research. The integration of both studies, however, takes place in the interpretation and discussion phase. (cf. Creswell, 2009, p. 208 ff.)
The sequential exploratory design uses quantitative research to “[…] enhance and complement qualitative results” (Harwell, 2011, p. 153 f.). It seeks to generalize the findings from the qualitative research to a broader sample.
In order to approach the first research question, qualitative research will be con-ducted by running usability tests with an appropriate number of users of the PS Recruitingportal 2.0. In this way, the author will gain live insights into the user behavior on the platform and will be enabled to describe the experiences of the participants with respect to the platform’s usability. The direct interaction with the user supports the researcher in detecting possible weak points that might have an impact on the user behavior. Open-ended questions before and after the test foster more meaningful responses and endorse greater flexibility between the researcher and the participant (cf. Mack et al., 2005, p.
In consideration of the available resources for this paper’s research and its objectives, usability tests in the form of thinking aloud tests were chosen for conducting the qualitative study. It was decided that this is the most appropriate method to detect usability weaknesses while gaining a comprehensive understanding of the users’ perceptions of the platform. The author will not refer to the thinking aloud method in this part again as the method and its characteris-tics have already been discussed in subchapter