A Disciplinary Framework to Study User Acceptance of Innovative Technologies

Up to date, the discipline of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has played a crucial role to understand users, usability, and user-centered systems design. However, it does not seem to provide a proper explanation of user perspectives on a special but crucial domain of innovative technologies, focusing more on mature technologies. In particular, success of innovative technologies requires a more specific attention to early adopters or technical enthusiasts rather than general end-users. There, user acceptance should be considered more than usability and convenience. At present, little is known about the ways of evaluating aspects of innovative technologies from user acceptance perspectives. This paper proposes a new discipline of Acceptability Engineering (AE) as an academic place where theories and methods for acceptable innovative technologies design can be discussed.