The Predisposition to the Use of Technology: When the Past Affects the Present in User Interaction

Purpose. The user competence in interaction studies is often analyzed as a domain–specific knowledge that is dependent on the system in use: the user’s level of expertise in use. We propose a bidimensional construct of user interaction competence by providing experimental evidence that not only the expertise is able to affect the interaction, but also the predisposition to the use of the system. With the terms predisposition we are referring to those individual skills and attitudes (general knowledge) that are independent from the system under evaluation. It is a cognition grounded in multiple ways (simulations, situated action, and bodily states) which re-enact perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with previous technologies stored in memory and characterized by differences in personality. We aimed to measure the effect of the predisposition to use as an independent variable affecting both experts’ and novices’ interaction, together with their level of expertise. Method. Two experiments are carried out with 180 students. In the first experiment, 50 novice users evaluated a website in free condition and 50 through the thinking aloud. In the second experiment, 40 trained and 40 non-trained users evaluate 8 websites with the same method of the experiment 1. Results. Our findings show that, independently from the level of expertise in use, the participants rely on their predisposition to use for interacting and evaluating the system. Conclusion. Those results, overcoming a unidimensional perspective only based on the expertise in use, demonstrate the validity of a bidimensional construct of user competence.