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...connected home and leisure activities, focus on the fun-aspect of using information systems, and encourage prolonged rather than productive use. The paper reports cross-sectional survey on the usage intentions for one hedonic information system. Analysis of this sample supports the hypotheses that perceived enjoyment and perceived ease of use are stronger determinants of intentions to use than perceived usefulness. The paper concludes that the hedonic nature of an information system is an important boundary condition to the validity of the technology acceptance model. Specifically, perceived usefulness loses its dominant predictive value in favor of ease of use and enjoyment.
Keywords: User acceptance, technology acceptance model, hedonic information systems, perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness
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Introduction
An important and long-standing research question in information systems is how we can accurately explain user acceptance of information systems (DeLone and McLean 1992). The dominant paradigm in this area of research is rooted in Davis' technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis 1989; Davis et al. 1989), which posits that user acceptance can be explained by two beliefs: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Perceived usefulness is defined as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance" (Davis 1989, p. 320). Perceived ease of use is defined as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free of effort" (Davis 1989, p. 320). An important addendum to the model is a third belief called perceived enjoyment (Davis et al. 1992). This concept is defined as "the extent to which the activity of using the computer is perceived to be enjoyable in its own right, apart from any performance consequences that may be anticipated" (Davis et al. 1992, p. 1113).
Since its original publication, the TAM model has undergone substantial replication, refinement, and extension. This body of research by and large confirms that perceived usefulness is the strongest predictor of user acceptance across a diverse area of research settings, at the expense of perceived ease of use and perceived enjoyment (Adams et al. 1992; Mahmood et al. 2001; Taylor and Todd 1995; Venkatesh and Davis 2000). The effect of perceived enjoyment, in particular, is consistently weaker than the effects of the original two beliefs (Davis et al. 1992; Igbaria, Parasuraman, and Baroudi 1996; Igbaria, Schiffman, and Wieckowski 1994).
This general pattern notwithstanding, a number of exceptions have been reported in the literature (e.g., Atkinson and Kydd 1997; Moon and Kim 2001; Venkatesh 1999). The information systems in these studies appear to be accepted less because of their perceived usefulness than because of their perceived enjoyment and perceived ease of use. Examples of such systems include the World Wide Web, systems used in the home or leisure environment, games, and game-based training versions of work-related information systems. These results suggest a boundary condition on the relative importance of the TAM belief set.
In line with consumer behavior literature that distinguishes between utilitarian and hedonic products (Hirschman and Holbrook 1982; Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), we can classify these types of systems as hedonic. The term hedonic derives from the word hedonism, a term used to denote the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the chief good in life (Merriam-Webster 2003). Hedonic systems aim to provide self-fulfilling value to the user, in contrast to utilitarian systems, which aim to provide instrumental value to the user. Instrumentality implies there is an objective external to the interaction between user and system, such as increasing task performance. Hedonic systems do not aim to facilitate any such objective. In its purest form, interacting with a hedonic system is designed to be an end in itself.
The utilitarian or hedonic nature of a system can be identified by looking at the tactics that system developers employ to encourage use. The objective of a utilitarian information system is to increase the user's task performance while encouraging efficiency....
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