The Relative Importance of Perceived Ease of Use in IS Adoption: A Study ofE-Commerce Adoption

摘要

The technology acceptance model (Davis 1989) is one of the most widelyrnused models of IT adoption. According to TAM, IT adoption is influenced by twornperceptions: usefulness and ease-of-use. Research has shown that perceivedrnusefulness (PU) affects intended adoption of IT, but has mostly failed to do sornregarding perceived ease of use (PEOU). The basic proposition of this study is thatrnthis varying importance of PEOU may be related to the nature of the task. PEOUrnrelates to assessments of the intrinsic characteristics of IT, such as the ease of use,rnease of learning, flexibility, and clarity of its interface. PU, on the other hand, is arnresponse to user assessment of its extrinsic, i.e., task-oriented, outcomes: how ITrnJournal of the Association for Information Systems 2rnhelps users achieve task-related objectives, such as task efficiency andrneffectiveness.rnAccordingly, the study theorizes that PEOU directly affects IT adoption onlyrnwhen the primary task for which the IT is deployed is directly associated withrnintrinsic IT characteristics, such as when the task itself is an integral part of an ITrninterface. Extending this proposition to e-commerce, it was hypothesized that whenrna Web site is used to purchase products, PEOU would not affect IT adoptionrnbecause IT ease-of-use is not an inherent quality of the purchased product. On thernother hand, when the Web site is used to inquire about products, PEOU shouldrnaffect IT adoption because the required information is embedded in the IT and thusrnits quality is directly related to IT ease-of-use. Data collected from 217 subjects inrna free simulation experiment support these hypotheses. Implications for future Webrndevelopment and theoretical refinements are discussed.