Gauging adoptability: a case study of e-portfolio template development

To help improve the decision-making process involved in planning for deployment of new centrally-supported internet technologies, the project described in this paper proposes a solution that makes use of web survey technology combined with some established research on users' technology adoption processes. Increasingly, academic computing service groups find themselves trying to decide when and how quickly to deploy new online services. As new forms of commercial and open source web-based applications become available at a quickening pace, for instance, questions arise as to whether a significant number of local users would actually use them. Moreover, the widespread use of XML and stylesheets as underlying presentation technologies in these web applications present academic support groups with even more deployment decisions, such as whether or not to invest time and resources in refining a particular web application's user interface. As described in this paper, these kinds of challenges can sometimes be met in a fairly easy and affordable way by drawing upon 1) recent developments in web survey technology along with 2) any of several models and constructs developed over the past two decades to help predict users' technology choices. Specifically, this paper describes a work-in-progress to develop an approach towards combining web survey systems together with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), in order to anticipate the usability and usefulness ratings among several candidate iterations of e-Portfolio templates under consideration for deployment in one university setting.