Information Environments and Human Behavior Over Time: From Initial Preferences To Mature Usage (Research Seminar, November 1st, 2001) Michael Davern (work co-authored with Dov Te'eni and Jae-Yun Moon) New York University Abstract From the prospective traveler surfing the web for cheap vacations to executives analyzing market trends with a data warehouse, at home and at work, people are confronted with increasingly richer information environments. In this study we model the preferences and behavior of the "information consumer" (web surfer or executive) in such environments in terms of two key design variables: content and structure. Drawing on literature in human-computer-interaction, technology acceptance, task/technology fit and ecological psychology we develop a model of human behavior in information environments from which we derive hypotheses about the dynamics of preferences and usage patterns from initial interaction to mature usage. We test our hypotheses in the context of informational websites. Specifically we postulate that the influence of structure on preferences amongst competing information environments will diminish with time, whereas the influence of content will increase. We examine these hypotheses in a longitudinal experiment employing 133 undergraduates with repeated exposure to eight purpose built websites. We develop constructs and measures for structural quality and content quality and postulate these as antecedents of the technology acceptance model constructs of ease of use and usefulness. At mature usage we hypothesize that frequency of usage will largely be driven by content quality and that the impact of structural quality will be heavily mediated by content quality. We test these hypotheses using a survey of 163 undergraduates providing responses about both a mandatory and voluntary use website for which they have mature usage experience. Both the experimental and survey results support our hypotheses. Our findings having implications both for ensuring early acceptance of an information environment, and also the potential negative effects of structural changes or adaptive structures on continued usage.