Investigating the adoption intention of gamification apps on mobile services

Abstract

Previous studies exploring adoption in the field of management information systems have focused on the objects of information systems or information technologies. However, since the popularity of smart phones has led to the usage of apps, limited investigations have attempted to understand the usage intention of apps. In this study, a research model is proposed to comprehend how users perceive and adopt a gamification app in the initial adoption phase of the information system life cycle. Since there are various topics within gamification services, we only pinpoint one popular type of service, exercise, as the research subject. The investigation involving 173 usable subjects was conducted to evaluate the model by using structural equation modelling. The result demonstrates that our proposed model explains 56.7% of the variance. The findings have interesting implications with respect to the initial usage of exercise gamification apps, both for researchers and practitioners.