May 17, 2004 -- Making something easy is hard.” That’s what McIntire assistant professor Mike Morris tells his information technology students.

Specifically, he emphasizes that the job of a technology designer is to make using technology easy. “The harder it is for the designer, the more time and effort the designer puts into programming, then the easier it will be for the person who uses that technology,” Morris says.

Whether in the classroom or conducting research, Morris focuses on the individual, human element in technology use: What makes it easy for a person to access important information from a database? Do gender and age make a difference in how easily someone accepts a new technology? Is a person more satisfied with his or her job when new technology is introduced? Is he or she more productive?

These questions and their answers are important to information technologists who want their designs to be successful and to business managers who realize that employee success using a new technology improves the company’s bottom line, boosts productivity, and helps to retain a satisfied work force.

Life-and-Death Decisions

Morris’ personal experience using an early visual interface years ago—on a Mac
with a 9-inch screen—sold him on the importance of easy-to-use technology. “I was
skeptical at first, but comparing the Mac with the PCs I used at the office, the Mac
was so easy, so intuitive,” Morris says.

“The graphical interface made me more productive as I was working on my master’s degree at the Air Force Institute of Technology. I was able to get more done in less time and at a higher level of quality using the new graphical interface.

Based on that experience, I decided to explore the issue of interface design further in my master’s thesis, and that interest has continued even today, almost 15 years later.”

A former Air Force officer who served on the Air Force Institute of Technology faculty before joining the McIntire School of Commerce, Morris saw practical applications for his research in the human factors design of everything from cockpit displays to decision support systems. An Air Force pilot’s ability to make crucial decisions quickly often depends on how well the interface design of the aircraft’s information technology systems works.

“In a military command-and-control environment, I looked at many different studies on display designs that help people make quick decisions, right decisions,” says Morris.

“When you are making life-and-death military decisions, the interface matters. But there are many other contexts in which interface design is important, from investment decisions to portfolio management decisions, right down to whether a
customer buys a product or not.”

High Technology Costs

The statistics are startling: 50 percent of all business investment is in new technology, and 50 percent of all new technology systems are underused. “Companies spend millions or billions of dollars to roll out technology systems that ultimately are not successful,” Morris says. “I think one of the causal factors is how usable, or unusable, those systems are for the average users out there just trying to do their job.

“When I went into my doctoral program in management information systems at Indiana University, I saw many people struggling to implement some very poor technologies that were difficult to use. I did my dissertation on technology acceptance based on my personal interest in the problem, and it has influenced my continuing research as well.”

Morris’ recently published research proposes a unified model for testing technology
acceptance. The relatively new field of technology acceptance is producing a rich proliferation of models and theories, which Morris and several other leaders in
the field believed it was time to unify.

“There was nothing wrong with any of the existing models. I’ve used many of them in my research, and they have had a big influence on my thinking. We just tried to bring it all together to push the field of technology acceptance forward,” he says. “It’s too early to tell if our model will be accepted for new research, but we’ve gotten some very good feedback from other researchers.”

New Frontiers

His latest research looks at workers’ job satisfaction and how it may increase or decrease over time when a new technology system is rolled out in the workplace. Workers who experience big increases or decreases in their job responsibilities
can become stressed and, therefore, dissatisfied. Those who experience a more moderate change in job responsibilities as a result of the technology, however, are likely to be satisfied with the change. “That is a finding managers need to pay attention to when they’re implementing a new technology,” says Morris. “Satisfied workers are more productive, and they are more committed to their jobs.”

Morris’ other recent research looks at the combined influence of gender and age on technology acceptance. “Probably our most interesting finding is that gender differences among an older group disappeared when we looked at the Gen-Xers,”
says Morris. “This may mean that Gen-Xers, who have been exposed to technology at an early age, may no longer perceive technology as a male-oriented domain, and that’s good news for IT professionals and businesses in general.”

If there is a trend toward equalization of women and men in the field of information technology, McIntire students lead the way. Fourth-year students concentrating in IT are evenly divided and third-year IT concentrators thus far are 63 percent
women, 37 percent men.