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Abstract In today’s industry of rapidly growing interfaces, any organization will have to get into a virtual environment with no boundaries to maintain its competitiveness and success. Virtual organizations are expected to be one of the promising organizational forms in this Internet cultural era. Virtual organizations are established and operated based on the Internet and other related technologies, whereby organizations will place the Internet at the center of their Business. A virtual organization’s success depends on its interface usability and to what extent it is usable for its employees and customers. Usability measures how well a specific user in a particular context can use a product or design to achieve a defined goal effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily. This thesis concerns Usability from a different perspective, which is wider than the interfaces. This thesis explores the Usability of organizations incorporating virtual components, irrespective of the virtuality percentage, focusing on organizational design and organizational factors such as information management; the studied dimensions are information sharing and exchange organizational communication; studied dimensions are effective communication and the reliance on communication technologies, and organization Culture; the studied dimensions are power distance and environmental uncertainty, and organization structure; the studied dimensions are formalization and decentralization. A system dynamics model is developed for such a dynamic and uncertain environment to simulate the relationships between those organizational factors and Usability. This thesis model includes quantitative and qualitative methods, including causal loop diagrams (CLD) and stock-flow diagrams. This model is implemented using data collected from online surveys of employees from different virtual organizations. The selected organizations with huge virtual parts are Amazon, Noon, and Jumia. This model is built using Vensim, which is frequently used for the system dynamics model. The result of this model shows significant relationships between those organizational factors and the Usability of virtual organizations for both employees and customers. This proves that the Usability of virtual organization is dependent on the interface designs and is indirectly affected by internal organizational factors. The results show that Noon is the most usable organization and will have the most significant number of customers after the model run time, which is two years. |