Abstract:
In today’s era of technological competitiveness, the world has witnessed an unprecedented
enhancement and technological expansion in electronic market. This tough competition has
made it really difficult for the firms to survive without introducing technological modifications
within existing business processes and structure. Therefore, it was wise enough for the
companies across the globe to invest huge part of their capital in launching web-based systems,
thus making sure that more users are involved and have access to the systems globally.
Nevertheless, the key factors that play the most vital role in making such systems successful,
is solely the will of users as to much extent they are comfortable using these systems. If users
are not willing to fully utilize given systems then this will not help firms to generate revenue
on their investment. It was therefore necessary to systematically understand users’ decision
making process towards acceptance of such systems.
In this regard this research was aimed to design and develop a framework of influential factors
that were expected to improve efficiency, acceptability and usage of web-based transactional
systems. The model developed in this study was based on well-established technology
acceptance model. Despite the popularity of technology acceptance model, there was not a
single study, as per author’s knowledge, that has studied and extended it from usability
perspective. Although usability has been considered in prior work as a dominant factor for
success of the system. Little efforts, however, were devoted to the fundamental issues such as
what specific usability characteristics are expected to have an impact on users’ acceptance
behaviour or how the acceptance or usage of such systems would be influenced by usability
features. This is so because if usability related dimensions/factors are indeed confirmed to show
an effect on users’ decision behaviour, online vendors and their design team would be able to focus on those specific dimensions and to positively motivate users towards such systems’
acceptance and usage.
