The Importance of Ease of Use, Usefulness, and Trust to Online Consumers - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 264

system was easy to learn, use, and control. Other
research has addressed the ease of use of particular
Web sites (Gefen et. al., 2003; Lederer et. al., 2000;
Lin & Lu, 2000). Since it is not the purpose of this
paper to assess the ease of using one particular
site, issues of color and link placement were not
relevant. The developed perceived ease of use
items therefore focus on the ease of the entire
transaction, including placing an order, making
payment and rectifying any problems. Five items,
contained in Table 2, were designed to address

the ease of use of buying online. A 5-point scale
was used ranging from (1) strongly agree to (5)
strongly disagree.
Since most applications of the technology
acceptance model have addressed systems in an
organizational context, prior usefulness mea-
sures have focused on work factors such as job
performance and productivity. Since this study
is addressing electronic commerce outside of an
organizational perspective, most of the conven-
tional measures were inappropriate. Using earlier

Table 1. Demographics on total sample and sub-groups

electronic Commerce
participants
(n = 65)

total sample
(n = 110)

electronic Commerce
non-participants (n = 45)

Chi
square

male (%)
female (%)

male (%)
female (%)

male (%)
female (%)

Gender

Middle school (%)
Some high school (%)
Completed H.S. (%)
Some college (%)
Completed college (%)
Advanced degree (%)

Middle school 0 (0%)
Some high school (%)
Completed H.S. (%)
Some college (%)
Completed college (%)
Advanced degree (%)

Middle school (%)
Some high school (%)
Completed H.S. (0%)
Some college (%)
Completed college (%)
Advanced degree (%)

Highest level of
education completed

Indep
Mean
t-test

Average Age years years 0 years

Average number of
hours spent using the
internet and email
per week

0. hours 0. hours . hours **

Average number of
hours spent using the
Internet (excluding
e-mail) per week

. hours . hours . hours **

Average number of
hours spent using
e-mail per week

. hours . hours . hours

Amount spent
online in the past six
months

$ $ $0 ***

* p < .05 ** p < .01 *** p < .001