Role of Perceived Response Time in Influencing the Relationship between Perceived Visual Appeal and Satisfaction Associated with Self-Service Business Intelligence Systems

Abstract

Organizations invest vast amounts of resources to equip their employees with leading edge Business Intelligence (BI) systems to power smart decisions. With significant digital upskilling in the last decade, most of the business intelligence systems are consumed in the self-service mode (e.g. Power BI, Tableau etc). It is of paramount importance to enhance the chances of success of these resource hungry self-service BI systems, to ensure the organizations can generate the desired payback from their investments. If the systems are not utilized as desired, it also impedes the quality of decisions made by the managers in these organizations, directly impacting the competitiveness of the organization.  Perceived Visual Appeal is a critical component of system’s quality that influences Satisfaction associated with self-service BI systems. High user interface quality, powered by its Visual Appeal is core to the reduction of cognitive load and enable easier evaluation of decision alternatives. From the literature on web customer Satisfaction, we learn that users make inferences about the attractiveness of a system from its design elements like Visual Appeal, ease of navigation, speed of content retrieval etc. UI designers many times face the dilemma of balancing Visual Appeal and Response Time, as the system can slow down when the designer augments more graphics, visual quality or uses custom visuals in tools like PowerBI. When we introduce ‘Perceived Response Time’ to gauge the user’s perception of the speed of content retrieval, alongside Perceived Visual Appeal into the model for measuring the satisfaction associated with self-service BI systems, we unearth interesting insights on how ‘Perceived Response Time’ significantly influences the relationship between ‘perceived Visual Appeal’ and ‘Satisfaction’ associated with self-service BI systems. We undertake a unique experiment-based approach to study how ‘Perceived Response Time’ mutes the relationship between Perceived Visual Appeal and Satisfaction, thereby providing value insights to the BI practitioners across industries. The learnings are significant as they can be extended to other information systems beyond self-service BI systems, contributing to the IS literature. This would inspire future research into the relative influence of system quality measures on Satisfaction.