Web 2.0 as organizational user-centered support

Abstract

The Internet today is used as a platform to communicate and many new areas are yet to be explored. Web 2.0 is one of the new areas, which provide new ways for people to communicate. Organizations are exploring this area and trying to use its benefits to give communication and cooperation within organizations an even greater value. The telephone support in large companies is often expensive and at the same time there are a lot of problems that the user could solve them selves, if they were able to find the right information. If this could be done organizations would save money and also make sure that the knowledge the users have doesn’t go to waste. The purpose of this thesis’s to provide our company with new ideas that could be useful for them when developing a user-centered support system with web 2.0 as platform. Analyze the benefits and disadvantages regarding web 2.0 applications and some functionality that needs to be taken into consideration in an organizational support system and to discuss an appropriate solution. The focus was on three areas in web 2.0 which are blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Different kind of methods like web development and gathering methods has been used. Our supervisor helped us in choosing the respondents that was most suitable for our research. Popular web 2.0 web pages provided us with new ideas in layout and functionality. All of the information would later on lead to a support page, which is combined; by a wiki and a discussion forum because of the advantages they together can provide a user. The layout solution will be presented as a low fidelity prototype in the conclusion chapter. We do feel that if web 2.0 is used in the right way it will be useful in organizational support and we do believe that organizations will implement this in the near future.