Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Software usability is an important issue of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). It is a critical quality factor that controls the quality and the performance of any interactive software (Pribeanu, 2017; Kabir et al., 2016). It has been argued that usability should be incorporated with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to evaluate the usability of the software in the pre-deployment phase and to enhance the performance of the software (Jain et al., 2012).
User acceptance of technology is considered as one of the primary knowledge fields of HCI which examines the factors that influence the acceptance and the adoption of end-user towards a new technology. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is deemed to be one of main models of user acceptance of technology branch (Shiau et al., 2016). TAM proposed by Davis (1989) has been the most extensively utilized model for exploring the behavioral intention of an end-user to adopt an information technology system. Zabukovsek et al. (2013) pointed out that TAM should be applied in the post-deployment phase of SDLC to acquire correct user feedback of a certain system usage.
Nowadays, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is widely used system in companies and industries. ERP system is a software package that integrates all information system applications across various departments of the company in one system in order to process effectively and accurately the massive amount of data generated in real time (Forcht et al., 2007). ERP system has many benefits to companies, such as: reducing the cost, boosting user performance and efficiency, increasing customer response time, improving business workflow process and enhancing communications between end-users of the system (Yan Huang et al., 2009; Hejase et al., 2017; SAP, 2017; Motiwalla et al., 2012; Zouine et al., 2014). Even though ERP system has great benefits, it suffers from poor usability characteristics (Veneziano et al., 2014; Lambeck et al., 2014). This will affect passively on the performance and the efficiency of the end-user and hence will discourage them from continuing to use ERP system (Faisal et al., 2012; Lambeck et al., 2014).
Many studies have been carried out to evaluate the usability of ERP system in post- deployment phase. As a consequence, the implementation success of ERP system depends on the enhancement and the improvement in interface usability based on the end-user feedback (Scholtz et al., 2016; Yassien et al., 2017; Almajali. et al., 2016). Because of the high cost of usability evaluation during the implementation phase of the ERP system, most of the ERP software developers and vendors tend to evaluate the usability in post-deployment phase to avoid such cost in SDLC (Scholtz et al., 2016).
Many studies have applied TAM to an ERP context (Lodhi et al., 2016; Sternad et al. 2013; Lee et al. 2010; Al-Jabri and Roztocki, 2015; Shih and Huang, 2009; Zabukovsek and Bobek, 2013; Sternad and Bobek, 2013; Kwahk and Lee, 2008). However, few studies have explored the impact of user interface quality on the acceptance of ERP system (Gül, 2017; Scholtz et al., 2016; Lin, 2013; Calisir and Calisir, 2004; Scott, 2008; Scott and Sugar, 2004). This paper aims to integrate usability model with modified TAM to explore and investigate the effectiveness of usability attributes on end user behavioral intention to accept and use ERP system in the post-deployment phase. In addition, this paper aims to evaluate the usability of ERP system in order to provide deeper insight into which attributes of the usability model has an impact on the success and the adoption of ERP system.