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How to motivate people to use internet at home: Understanding the psychology of non-active users
Abstract
Although many Internet services exist that can raise our quality of life, there are still many non-active users who cannot fully enjoy the convenience of the Internet and its potential even when they have computers in the home. To deeply understand this failure to use the Internet, we conducted a field study, and arrived at an integrated model depicting the psychology of active/non-active computer users. Our model enables us to understand the psychology of the users and the external factors affecting them and sheds light on how non-active users are stuck in a negative loop. Users that received a support service designed on our model dramatically changed their attitude and started to use the service actively.
... In fact, Nakatani et al. (2012) explored this direction of relationships between factors by trying to understand why non-active users do not use Internet. Their main purpose was to activate this part of the population. ...
... Even if we explain here only three components of the loop, we can observe that if the user enters in, it will be complicated for him to escape the negative loop with these chained factors. The Nakatani's model made us aware that relations existed between different elements that lead to the reluctance of use. Figure 1 Model of non-active user (Nakatani et al. 2012) by Satchell and Dourish (2009), we do not want to confine oneself to reasons or factors. ...
... One paper in particular caught our attention. Indeed, Nakatani et al. (2012) are the only ones to really explore relationships between factors to explain a non-use behaviour. By keeping this concept in mind, we also look at the TAM (Davis 1985), one of the most accepted and employed model to predict the adoption of an information system by a group of people. ...
During life, everyone goes through different events, from the happiest (expecting a child, a wedding) to the saddest (dismissal, funerals). These events are named major life changing events (MLCE), some of their characteristics are: First, there are happening rarely. Second, they may be complex and rough. Third, people are dealing with new and unknown situations. Next, they often lead to uncertainty. Finally, they may cause people anxiety and stress. For these reasons, these times might need both emotional and logistic supports. Besides, many of these supports may be found nowadays through interactive services. However, at a time when digital solutions have never been so numerous, there is a part of the population who do not use or just a little the interactive services and new technologies. These people are characterized more by being critics of digital solutions rather than fully non-users. Even though they have an option to use interactive services or not, they make the decision to maintain a low usage level. For these reasons, we define this minority of the population: the new techno-critics.
Through semi-structured interviews, we studied their concerns and attitudes towards interactive services in the context of MLCE. We found that these people prefer more traditional supports (for example, ask the friends and family for help or for professional advices) as they have generally a negative opinion of new technologies. We found that this negative opinion is based on five main aspects: First, the participants think that new technologies dehumanize people. Second, they are disappointed that people are dependent to digital solutions. Third, they are upset that most of the time interactive services and new technologies are time-consuming. This is an aspect they noted through observations among regular users and even with themselves. Fourth, we learned that they are disturbed by the quantity of information that can be found on Internet and interactive services. By having too much information, they do not know where they can search and what they can trust. Finally, they highlight that interactive services are linked to data privacy issues. They are afraid their digital information might be stolen. By listening carefully, we provide several design implications with the desire to help these individuals at major events in their lives. Unexpectedly, we also learn that the comments of the new techno-critics are supported by regular users of interactive services. This give the feeling that the findings will serve a wider population than expected.
... Scholars studying non-users tried to define which factors played a role in usage versus non-usage of technology. Suggestions have included a lack of skills, confidence (Nakatani et al. 2012), complexity of use and other demographic factors (e.g. age, gender, marital status, socio-economic status) (Wyatt, Thomas, and Terranova 2002;Lenhart et al. 2003;Selwyn 2003). ...
Life-changing events (or LCEs) can alter a person's status quo and threaten well-being. Previous research investigated distinct LCEs, where participants already used technology routinely. This paper reports the results of two field studies through which we compared supports people refer to when experiencing different LCEs. Together with users of technology, our sampling included participants who specifically did not refer to online services and tools to seek help during their LCE. We found that popular services people refer to are inattentive to the needs of people experiencing an LCE as they do not allow forms of progressive engagement and disclosure within the service. We also found that popular services are imprudent as their design might expose users experiencing an LCE to more sources of stress. Finally, we found that these services are inapt to support these users as they do not provide direct forms of interactions with experts.
Voice assistants embodied in smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo, Google Home) enable voice-based interaction that does not necessarily rely on expertise with mobile or desktop computing. Hence, these voice assistants offer new opportunities to different populations, including individuals who are not interested or able to use traditional computing devices such as computers and smartphones. To understand how older adults who use technology infrequently perceive and use these voice assistants, we conducted a 3-week field deployment of the Amazon Echo Dot in the homes of seven older adults. While some types of usage dropped over the 3-week period (e.g., playing music), we observed consistent usage for finding online information. Given that much of this information was health-related, this finding emphasizes the need to revisit concerns about credibility of information with this new interaction medium. Although features to support memory (e.g., setting timers, reminders) were initially perceived as useful, the actual usage was unexpectedly low due to reliability concerns. We discuss how these findings apply to other user groups along with design implications and recommendations for future work on voice-user interfaces.
One of the key factors we should consinder in designing the new ICT services that provide high user experience is environment. In this paper, we show two example in which the use of ICT service strongly depends on the environment in which the service is provided. We then propose an environment-centered approach for desinging ICT services. Traditional user-centered approaches like the persona-scenario method focus on the user domain, but environmental factors are considered in little while designing servies. We found, however, that service use is diversed drastially in the different environments. We have started to examine the proposed approach for ICT service design. A preliminary finding is that we can focus on environmental factors, especially, the environmental difference at different times, which is not considered explicitly in the traditional user-centered approach.
Despite advances in technology, nearly everyone experiences technical chal- lenges using home computers and the Internet. In a field trial of household Internet usage, 89% of 93 families needed support from a computer help desk in the 1st year they used the Internet. However, usually only the most technically involved members of the family requested external technical support, and this behavior was associated with other computer-related behaviors in the house- hold. We explore the process by which a family member with comparatively high technical skill or enthusiasm, often a teenager, becomes the family guru,
One of the most sweeping changes ever in the ecology of human cognition may be taking place today. People are beginning to learn and use very powerful and sophisticated information processing technology as a matter of daily life. From the perspective of human history, this could be a transitional point dividing a period when machines merely helped us do things from a period when machines will seriously help us think about things. But if this is so, we are indeed still very much within the transition. For most people, computers have more possibility than they have real practical utility.
The movement of design out of the workplace and into the home brings with it the need to develop new analytic concepts to
consider how ubiquitous computing might relate to and support everyday activities in domestic settings. In this paper we present
a number of concepts derived from ethnographic studies of routine activities and technology uses implicated in the production
and consumption of communication in the home. These concepts sensitise design to the importance of the ecology of the domestic
space and distributed arrangements of collaboration to communication. They draw attention to the places where communication
is accomplished and the routines whereby communication is articulated, thereby highlighting ‘prime sites’ for situating ubiquitous
computing in the domestic environment.
This research follows a group of users over time (16 months) as they progress from novice towards expert in their use of Lotus 1-2-3. Quantitative and qualitative measures of performance are compared with expert users having over three years of experience. The results indicate that the motor aspects of performance are relatively stable over time, while improvement in the cognitive components of the skill are dependent on aspects of the menu structure and how many things must be retrieved from memory, among other things. These results imply extensions to the Keystroke Level Model of skilled performance as well as suggest ways to design the user interfaces so as to speed the acquisition of expertise.
Prior research suggests that people may ask their family and friends for computer help. But what influences whether and how a "helper" will provide help? To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative investigation of people who participated in computer support activities with family and friends in the past year. We describe how factors including maintenance of one's personal identity as a computer expert and accountability to one's social network determine who receives help and the quality of help provided. We also discuss the complex, fractured relationship between the numerous stakeholders involved in the upkeep of home computing infrastructures. Based on our findings, we provide implications for the design of systems to support informal help-giving in residential settings.
As computing migrates from the workplace to the home, householders must tackle problems of home network maintenance. Often they lack the technical knowledge or motivation to complete these tasks, making the user experience of home network maintenance frustrating. In response to these difficulties, many householders rely on handwritten reminders or interactive networking tools that are ill-suited for the home environment. In this paper, we seek to understand how to design better home network management tools through a study of sketches created by 40 people in 18 households. In our study, we obtained information about householders' knowledge, practices and needs with respect to home networking. Based on our results, we present guidelines for transforming the user experience of home network management.
In this paper we present Family Accounts, a new user account model for shared home computers. We conducted a study with sixteen families, eight who used individual profiles at home, and eight who shared a single profile. Our results demonstrate that Family Accounts is a good compromise between a single shared profile and individual profiles for each family member. In particular, we observed that because Family Accounts allowed individuals to switch profiles without forcing them to interrupt their tasks, family members tended to switch to their own profiles only when a task required some degree of privacy or personalization.
Numerous studies have shown that many users do not acquire the knowledge necessary for the effective and efficient use of computer applications such as spreadsheets and Web-authoring tools. While many cognitive, cultural, and social reasons have been offered to explain this phenomenon, there have been few systematic attempts to address it. This article describes how we identified a framework to organize effective and efficient strategies to use computer applications and used an approach called strategy-based instruction to teach those strategies over five years to almost 400 students. Controlled experiments demonstrated that the instructional approach (1) enables students to learn strategies without harming command knowledge, (2) benefits students from technical and nontechnical majors, and (3) is robust across different instructional contexts and new applications. Real-world classroom experience of teaching strategy-based instruction over several instantiations has enabled the approach to be disseminated to other universities. The lessons learned throughout the process of design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination should allow teaching a large number of users in many organizations to rapidly acquire the strategic knowledge to make more effective and efficient use of computer applications.
The rapid growth and development of the Internet and the resulting growth in interest in access to network facilities highlight an increasing prominence of computer technology in the home. In this article we report on a study of the social organization of a number of domestic environments in the northwest of England and consider the ways in which an understanding of the nature of the home is of interest to the developers of future interactive technology. Thus, in the first half of the article we consider the everyday nature of home life, and in the second half we report on an ethnographically based evaluation of a prototype set top box for the provision of digital services to the home. In addition to reflecting on the nature of activities in the home we conclude by considering the design implications that can be drawn from an examination of these activities.
Individual adoption of technology has been studied extensively in the workplace. Far less attention has been paid to adoption of technology in the household. In this paper, we performed the first quantitative test of the recently developed model of adoption of technology in households (MATH). Further, we proposed and tested a theoretical extension of MATH by arguing that key demographic characteristics that vary across different life cycle stages would play moderating roles. Survey responses were collected from 746 U.S. households that had not yet adopted a personal computer. The results showed that the integrated model, including MATH constructs and life cycle characteristics, explained 74 percent of the variance in intention to adopt a PC for home use, a significant increase over baseline MATH that explained 50 percent of the variance. Finally, we compared the importance of various factors across household life cycle stages and gained a more refined understanding of the moderating role of household life cycle stage.
The domestic environment is predicted by market analysts to be the major growth area in computing over the next decade, yet it is a poorly understood domain at the current time of writing. Research is largely confined to the laboratory environment, although it has been recognized that ubiquitous computing will in due course have to resonate with the ‘stable and compelling routines of the home’. This paper seeks to inform ubiquitous computing for the home environment by unpacking the notion of domestic routines as coordinational features of domestic life. We focus in particular on the routine nature of communication and use ethnographic study to explicate a discrete organization of coordination whereby household members routinely manage communications coming into and going out of the home. The coordinate ways in which members routinely organize communication are made visible through sequences of practical action, which articulate domestic routines and key properties of communication. These include ecological habitats, activity centres, and coordinate displays at which technology is at the core. These organizational features combine to form a locally produced system of communication and open up the play of possibilities for design, articulating the distinct needs of particular settings and ‘prime sites ’ for the deployment of ubiquitous computing devices.
Valid measurement scales for predicting user acceptance of computers are in short supply. Most subjective measures used in practice are unvalidated, and their relationship to system usage is unknown. The present research develops and validates new scales for two specific variables, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, which are hypothesized to be fundamental determinants of user acceptance. Definitions for these two variables were used to develop scale items that were pretested for content validity and then tested for reliability and construct validity in two studies involving a total of 152 users and four application programs. The measures were refined and streamlined, resulting in two six-item scales with reliabilities of .98 for usefulness and .94 for ease of use. The scales exhibited high convergent, discriminant, and factorial validity. Perceived usefulness was significantly correlated with both self-reported current usage (r=.63, Study 1) and self-predicted future usage (r =.85, Study 2). Perceived ease of use was also significantly correlated with current usage (r=.45, Study 1) and future usage (r=.59, Study 2). In both studies, usefulness had a significantly greater correlation with usage behavior than did ease of use. Regression analyses suggest that perceived ease of use may actually be a causal antecedent to perceived usefulness, as opposed to a parallel, direct determinant of system usage. Implications are drawn for future research on user acceptance.
This paper is also based on interviews with 11 families in the Boston area in 1997, conducted by the first author. They were designed specifically to examine the location and use of the home PC by difference members of the family. All families owned a multimedia PC and had children living at home, but represented a spread of income levels (between $20-100+k per year), housing types (private house, condominium, apartment) and locations (urban, suburban, rural). Eight of the 11 families had an Internet connection. Transcripts of both sets of interviews were coded to indicate discussion of topics relevant to the dynamics of computer and Internet use. The resulting topic collections were surprisingly large for both studies, indicating that families had a lot to say about constituent issues such as the location of the computer, and the way it is shared and managed within the family. In the following sections of the chapter we step through the major findings in this collection as they relate to the groups of questions raised in the previous section. Where necessary, we cite relevant quantitative findings to back-up the qualitative analysis. We preserve the same ordering of issues and questions as before, addressing the timing, location and shared use of the home computer in turn
Numerous studies have shown that many users do not acquire the knowledge necessary for the effective and efficient use of computer applications such as spreadsheets and Web-authoring tools. While many cognitive, cultural, and social reasons have been offered to explain this phenomenon, there have been few systematic attempts to address it. This article describes how we identified a framework to organize effective and efficient strategies to use computer applications and used an approach called strategy-based instruction to teach those strategies over five years to almost 400 students. Controlled experiments demonstrated that the instructional approach (1) enables students to learn strategies without harming command knowledge, (2) benefits students from technical and nontechnical majors, and (3) is robust across different instructional contexts and new applications. Real-world classroom experience of teaching strategy-based instruction over several instantiations has enabled the approach to be disseminated to other universities. The lessons learned throughout the process of design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination should allow teaching a large number of users in many organizations to rapidly acquire the strategic knowledge to make more effective and efficient use of computer applications.
What are the effects of experience on text editing behavior? Do users inevitably develop optimal strategies for getting their work done? The answer to such questions are becoming increasingly important, as more and more individuals begin to use word processing equipment routinely. In the best of all possible worlds, experienced users do become experts, able to quickly and accurately choose and execute optimal procedures to accomplish any given goal. Such a state of affairs would make designers of editing systems very happy indeed. But another alternative exists, that at least some proportion of experienced and frequent users stabilize at some nonoptimal level of skill. An initial survey of relevant research is encouraging. So, for example, Card, Moran, and Newell (1980) were able to deduce selection rules from experienced users' editing behavior that predicted 80% of their editing decisions, suggesting that experienced users have fairly well-defined heuristics for carrying out editing tasks. Tyler and Roth (1982) followed up on this work, demonstrating that novices were less likely to demonstrate selection rules than experienced users, preferring instead to rely on a single, sometimes inefficient, strategy. Finally, Folley and Williges (1982) demonstrated that when confronted with the description of a novel editor, users experienced on other systems make use of a greater number of commands in carrying out a paper-and-pencil application of the editor than do complete novices.
[Editor's note: This study is based on data on a panel of households recruited as a random telephone sample of the U.S. population. In order to use the Internet for the purpose of efficient multi-channel data collection, each household in the sample--with or without prior Internet connection--was equipped with a WebTV® set-top box, with free Internet access and email accounts. The data for the study were collected in December 1999, from a national random sample of 4,113 individuals in 2,689 panel households. The margin of sampling error is about ±1.5% for results from the complete survey, and about ±2.5% for the subset of Internet users.]
This paper brings the intellectual tools of cognitive science to bear on resolving the “paradox of the active user” [Interfacing Thought: Cognitive Aspects of Human–Computer Interaction, Cambridge, MIT Press, MA, USA]—the persistent use of inefficient procedures in interactive tasks by experienced or even expert users when demonstrably more efficient procedures exist. The goal of this paper is to understand the roots of this paradox by finding regularities in these inefficient procedures. We examine three very different data sets. For each data set, we first satisfy ourselves that the preferred procedures used by some subjects are indeed less efficient than the recommended procedures. We then amass evidence, for each set, and conclude that when a preferred procedure is used instead of a more efficient, recommended procedure, the preferred procedure tends to have two major characteristics: (1) the preferred procedure is a well-practiced, generic procedure that is applicable either within the same task environment in different contexts or across different task environments, and (2) the preferred procedure is composed of interactive components that bring fast, incremental feedback on the external problem states. The support amassed for these characteristics leads to a new understanding of the paradox. In interactive tasks, people are biased towards the use of general procedures that start with interactive actions. These actions require much less cognitive effort as each action results in an immediate change to the external display that, in turn, cues the next action. Unfortunately for the users, the bias to use interactive unit tasks leads to a path that requires more effort in the long run. Our data suggest that interactive behavior is composed of a series of distributed choices; that is, people seldom make a once-and-for-all decision on procedures. This series of biased selection of interactive unit tasks often leads to a stable suboptimal level of performance.
Domestic technologies have been a popular area of study for ubiquitous computing researchers, however there is relatively little recent data on how families currently use and share technologies in domestic environments. This paper presents results from an empirical study of 15 families in the U.S in early 2007. We examined the types of technologies families own, including TVs, music players, phones and computers; where they were situated within the home; and the degree of shared ownership and use. Our results call attention to the prevalence of shared usage of technology in domestic environments and also suggest opportunistic spaces for ubiquitous computing technology. While not all ubiquitous computing technologies for domestic environments will be shared, the diverse ways families chose to share their computers suggest that future devices might better match how families wish to use shared technology by supporting both the shared usage model of appliances and the ability to access a personal profile.
In this paper we explore the use of computer at home. This work is based on the automatic recording of application focus data in natural situation from a wide representative panel of 661 households with 1,434 users at home over 19 months. To process these large-scale data, we build a two- level classification of PC applications describing the whole PC use. At the household level, we worked on computer usage temporality: we observed two strategies of PC usage reflecting a tension between synchronous and asynchronous usage profiles. At the individual level, we found out that software preferences and usage intensity are rather independent; therefore, we distinguished five specific profiles of users reflecting strong routine behaviors of computer usage at home. These observations tend to show the strength of routine behaviors in computer usage. Author Keywords Computer usage, user generated events, user profiles, representative panel.
This paper considers the nature of interactive systems design for domestic environments. As part of this work it highlights @e methodological issues faced in the design of systems for the home. The shortage of detailed knowledge of activities in the home is highlighted. A series of studies of domestic environments is presented alongside the design challenges they raise.
This paper considers the nature of interactive technology within domestic environments and how we might want to consider the design of technology for domestic environments. As part of this work it highlights the methodological issues faced in the design of systems for the home environments. The shortage of detailed knowledge of activities in the home is highlighted as a major issue in understanding the situated nature of technologies. A series of studies of domestic environments is presented alongside the design challenges they raise.
U.S. WEST Advanced Technologies documented the experiences and attitudes of 50 families that belong to The Virtual School (TVS), an educational project that links 500 families whose children attend parochial schools in Winona. The data gathered provide insights on the technical support strategies that must be adopted to ensure a wide and democratic access to the Internet.
Research focused on the user experience of home networking repeatedly finds that householders have difficulties setting up networked equipment. No research to date, however, has studied the in the moment interactions of householders with networking technical support professionals. In this paper, we analyze 21 phone calls to a technical support call center of a home network hardware manufacturer. The phone calls focus on overcoming difficulties during one particular task: adding a wireless router to an existing home network. Our results reaffirm prior studies in remote collaboration that suggest a need to support shared understandings of the problem at hand between remote parties. Our results also suggest that technical properties of the home network and the structure of the home itself complicate the social work of remote diagnosis and repair. In response, we suggest new approaches for remote home network problem diagnosis and repair, including resources for householders to reason about their home networks prior to call placement, and improved methods of inter-organizational information sharing between stakeholders.
Reissued as The Design of Everyday Things in 1990. Author's website : http://www.jnd.org
While technology adoption in the workplace has been studied extensively, drivers of adoption in homes have been largely overlooked. This paper presents the results of a nation-wide, two-wave, longitudinal investigation of the factors driving personal computer (PC) adoption among American homes. The findings revealed that innovators and early adopters were driven by a desire to obtain hedonic outcomes (i.e., pleasure) and social outcomes (i.e., status) from adoption. The early majority was strongly influenced by utilitarian outcomes, and friends and family members. The late majority and laggards have not adopted primarily because of rapid changes in technology and consequent fear of obsolescence. A second wave of data collection conducted six months after the initial survey indicated an asymmetrical relationship between intent and behavior among intenders and non-intenders, with non-intenders following more closely with their intent (to not adopt a PC). We present important implications for research on adoption of technologies in homes and the workplace, and also discuss challenges facing the PC industry. Indiana University
Spreadsheet models are increasingly being used in decision making within organizations. With questions about the quality of these models, an investigation was conducted into the spreadsheet practices in ten firms, with an emphasis on the process of building spreadsheet models. The study showed that spreadsheet models were usually built in an informal, iterative manner, by people from all organizational levels. These people had received very little training in the building of models, which could help explain why at least 25% of the models contained errors. Other problems were also found. It was evident that the spreadsheet practices in the firms were inadequate. There is a need for increased training as well as setting and enforcing organizational spreadsheet standards. This could provide an opportunity for OR workers if carefully handled. Although the study was viewed as exploratory, it indicated a need for further study into the effect of formal design practices on the incidence of errors and model creation time.
Bass, W. and Esselink, A. K. PC time and money
- W Bass
- A K Esselink
- Bass W.