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December 20, 2003
Keys to Adoption: 'Ease of Use' and 'Usefulness'
ExtremeTech has an interesting article about how marketers often try to claim that a new device is "easy to operate as a TV." Well, that doesn't really mean much any more, and as home A/V electronics resemble PCs more and more, we may be in for a backslide in terms of usability.
"In the past year, I've added two different home theater setups in my house and played around with a lot of home theater equipment of various types -- ranging to entry-level Home Theater In a Box kits to high-end receivers and media recorders. What I'm struck by is just how painful most of these are to install – and how much more of a pain they are to use."
In the late 1980's, an academic researcher named Fred Davis, along with some colleagues, published a simple theory, the "Technology Acceptance Model". That model posits that two factors will greatly influence the propensity of someone to adopt, or begin using regularly, a particular technology.
Those two factors are A) perceived usefulness (i.e., how much benefit does the technology offer to the user), and B) perceived ease of use (i.e., how simple and/or intuitive is the technology). Usability experts like Jakob Nielsen have long decried the ever-complexifying of web and user interfaces in software. The same complaints can obviously be made about hardware, as the ExtremeTech article plainly points out.
So, what can we do? Well, maybe it's time for industry to start listening to researchers a bit more. While it seems perfectly obvious now that usefulness and ease of use should influence someone's decision to adopt a technology, judging from the store shelves and marketing messages, that insight hasn't found its way thoroughly into the world's top consumer electronics makers.
Posted by Craig in Industry
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