Exploring the Psychological Determinants of Perceived Ease of Use and Usefulness

The question of why individuals adopt a particular information system is an important issue in IS research. While extensive prior research has established that the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) does a good job of predicting a user's intention to adopt an information system through the constructs Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU), relatively little attention has been paid to the antecedents associated with the formation of these perceptions. Understanding the determinants of PEOU and PU is essential for providing actionable recommendations for practice in order to influence ultimate system use. This paper reports on an exploratory study investigating the effect of various antecedent variables on PEOU and PU for technologies of varying complexity. The intention is to converge on an experimental model that focuses on the salient variables.