Factors Influencing the Willingness to Download Contact Tracing Apps among the American Population
Kiemute Oyibo, Plinio Pelegrini Morita · 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020, necessitated the roll-out of contact tracing apps (CTAs) worldwide. However, there is limited work to understand the various factors that influence the adoption of CTAs, and the moderating effect of persuasive design and smartphone usage experience. Consequently, we carried out an empirical study among the American population (n = 160) using screenshots of key interfaces of an existing CTA available on the market. The interfaces comprise two types of designs: persuasive version (equipped with persuasive features) and control version (unequipped with persuasive features). Our Partial Least Square Path Model showed that perceived usefulness (β = 0.23, p < 0.05) and perceived compatibility (β = −0.33, p < 0.01) are important to downloading the control version of the app. However, perceived trust (β = 0.45, p < 0.05) is important to downloading the persuasive version of the app. Moreover, perceived usefulness (β = 0.26, p < 0.05) and perceived risk (β = −0.26, p < 0.05) is important for the high-experience group (people with more than 10 years of experience in smartphone usage) and perceived trust (β = 0.46, p < 0.05) for the low-experience group. We discuss the implications of the findings.