Perceived Usability and the Modified Technology Acceptance Model

In response to recent criticism of the usefulness of the construct of usability, we investigated the relationships between measures of perceived usability and the components of a modified version of the Technology Acceptance Model (mTAM) - Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease-of-Use (PEU). In three surveys, respondents used SUS, UMUX-LITE and mTAM to rate their actual (as opposed to expected) experience with three software products. As expected, the correlations between PEU and other measures of perceived usability tended to be significantly stronger than those with PU. Additional findings support the use of the UMUX-LITE as a compact measure of perceived usability that has a strong relationship to the mTAM and strong correspondence with concurrently collected SUS scores. The main theoretical result of this research were regression results providing evidence that the PEU component of the mTAM appears to be another measure of the construct of perceived usability, connecting the TAM to the construct of perceived usability through the mTAM and providing evidence against the claim that the construct of usability is a theoretical dead end.