User Motivation in Application Abandonment: A Four-Drives Model

ABSTRACT

Abandonment of software applications can result in significant loses of organizational resources while also undermining the continued success of application developers, vendors, and software support ecosystems. Relatively little attention, however, has been directed toward understanding application abandonment that occurs after applications have been successfully adopted, despite the potentially far-reaching implications of such abandonment and the growing economic and social importance of software applications. We therefore developed a framework based on the four-drives model of motivation to better understand postadoption abandonment decisions and conducted an archival study to test our proposed framework in a hedonically oriented personal-use context. Results of this study suggest that individual motivations to acquire status and experience, bond with others, comprehend and grow, and defend their efforts all have significant implications for the likelihood of application abandonment. Specifically, application-related use activity, in-application user interaction, application complexity, and application commitments were all found to significantly diminish the likelihood of application abandonment.

KEY WORDS:

• AND PHRASES: Software apps
• app abandonment
• app discontinuance
• hedonic applications
• postadoption abandonment
• user motivation
• four-drives model

Supplemental data

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Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brent Furneaux

Brent Furneaux ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an associate professor at the University of Windsor’s Odette School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from York University’s Schulich School of Business and is pursuing research that seeks to better understand information system obsolescence, and information system upgrade, replacement, and abandonment decisions made by organizations and individuals. His research interests also include the implications of financial technologies for the financial services industry and the mechanisms by which information systems deliver value to organizations and individual users. Dr. Furneaux’s research has been published in a wide range of journals, including MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information and Management, DATABASE, and the Journal of Computer Information Systems, as well as numerous book chapters and international conference proceedings.

Lars Rieser

Lars Rieser ([email protected]) is an assistant professor with the department of accounting and information management of Maastricht University. He received his Ph.D. in information management from Maastricht University and is pursuing research that seeks to better understand user behavior and decision-making in software ecosystems. His research interests also include the role of user–developer interactions during the postrelease stage of the software life cycle, as well as issues related to software end-of-life decisions and obsolescence.