An Empirical Study of User Experience (UX) Factors Affecting Continued Usage Intention of Smartphone

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· 발행기관 : 아시아.유럽미래학회
· 수록지 정보 : 유라시아연구 / 9권 / 4호 / 91 ~ 118페이지
· 저자명 : Xue Ning, 김기수

초록

Smartphone is a new generation of mobile phones and it is a good example of ubiquitous computing technology. Users can surf the internet anytime and anywhere through the easy touch-screen interface. Also users can connect with their friends in more efficient ways than calling or texting messages. Besides, its prominent hardware and software support all kinds of applications for work and entertainment (Charlesworth, 2009). Verkasalo et al. (2010) pointed that Smartphone is a device that can be used as a mobile phone as well as a handheld computer, they also argued that it is the user rather than the device who controls the Smartphone.
When users interact with Smartphone, their experience of using Smartphone is derived from such interactions. Goto, K. defines User Experience (UX) as "the overall perception and comprehensive interaction an individual has with a company, service or product" (Wang et al., 2008). Experience is an intangible process of interaction between people and the world that exists in humans' minds and is triggered by new interactions. These may create different types of experiences such as physical, sensual, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic (Davis, 1992). From this aspect, after using Smartphone, users' experience on the functions of it and their social experiences with it might be very important in deciding if they continue to use Smartphones.
Given the growth of the number of Smartphone users and the competition among Smartphone manufacturers and service providers, it is important to understand the dynamics that govern the continued usage intention of Smartphone. However, previous researches on this topic have mostly focused on problems such as creating efficient interfaces, developing usable systems, and establishing technologies, which paid more attention to the facet of functions of the Smartphone itself rather than studying from users' psychological perspective (Lin and Ye, 2009; Abowd et al., 2005; Verstockt et al., 2009).
On the other hand, over the last few years there have been various attempts to provide a comprehensive theory or framework of user experience (Swallow et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2008; Oza et al., 2010; Deng and Li, 2008). Since people spend more and more time with Smartphones, the experience users have with Smartphones is likely to be a key factor in the cognitive process users experience in developing their continued usage intention. Upon this basis, in contrast to previous researches, we employ the concept of User Experience (UX) as the antecedents in this study to explain the continued usage intention of Smartphone, Therefore, this study focuses on users' experience to assess their further attitudes and behaviors. Users’ experience is represented in two aspects, one is functional experience which includes usability and security, and the other is social experience which includes sociability and social identity. A research model was developed to conceptualize the relationships between these UX factors as antecedent variables and continued usage intention of Smartphons as consequent variables with two intermediary variables. Specifically, we considered perceived enjoyment (PE) and perceived usefulness (PU) as mediating factors between UX factors and the continued usage intention of Smartphone (CUI) since it is widely used not only for functional purposes but for entertainment and social relations. Then our research model was tested empirically by using a survey data collected from diverse Smartphone users.
Our results suggest that experience about functional factors and social factors of Smartphone after using Smartphones can influence the perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment of their usage, which, in turn, influence users' continued usage intention of Smartphones. More specifically, we found that usability has a significant positive impact on both PU and PE, while security has a strong effect on PE, although no such significant impact was observed on PU. Some previous researchers pointed out that Smartphones are vulnerable and, therefore, security is a very important factor influencing the perceived usefulness of Smartphones. However, security did not affect perceived usefulness of Smartphones significantly in our result. A plausible explanation for this result might be that approximately 60% of our survey respondents are students and they do not consider security issue seriously because they use Smartphones mostly for entertainment or social interactions rather than for job or work related purposes. However, it does not mean security issue is not important for usefulness of Smartphones or the current level of security of Smartphone is perfect. Moreover, sociability is found to affect both PE and PU, while social identity have significant impact on PU only. Besides, PE showed a significant effect on perceived usefulness of using Smartphone and both PE and PU positively affected CUI.
Main contributions of this research are as following. First the concept of user experience, which is a relatively new concept in MIS researches, was adopted to explain users’ continued intention to use Smartphones. Moreover, not only functional experience but social experience was included as user experience factors. This paper also makes contributions in understanding the important factors affecting users’ continued usage intention of Smartphones and the dynamics of these effects, which can provide useful information for Smartphone service providers.
There are, however, some limitations inherent in this study. Although user experience is a broad concept, we focused only a part of it. Other aspects of user experience may be considered in future researches. More systematic research on user experience may be also needed related with Smartphone usage. In our survey data, relatively large number of university students were included, therefore, we have limitation in generalizing the results. Since the survey data were gathered from Korean, the analysis results may be subject to culture and/or other environmental biases. In future researches, we may use survey data from users of different countries and also implement a cross country analysis.

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