Relationship between trust and usability in virtual environments: An ongoing study

Abstract

Usability and trust have been observed to be related in several domains including web retail, information systems, and e-health. Trust in technology reflects beliefs about the attributes of a technology. Research has shown that trust is a key factor for the success of different systems – e.g., e-market, e-commerce, and social networks. Trust in technology can be supported or prevented by the perceived usability. Therefore, a low level of usability could compromise an individual’s trust in their use of a technology, resulting in a negative attitude towards a product. Even if this relationship has been seen as important in the fields listed above, there is limited research which empirically assesses trust and usability in virtual reality (VR). This work will present the first set of data on the relationship between usability and trust in VR. To gather this data, three different VR systems (Desktop 3D tool, CAVE, and a flight simulator) were tested. The findings show that (i) the best-known questionnaire to measure usability and trust could be applied to VR, (ii) there is a strong relationship between people’s satisfaction and trust in the use of VR, (iii) the relationship between usability and trust exists for different systems.