The Eureka Effect: Exploring the Benefits of Struggling with Technology

This research in progress piece adds two interesting theoretical insights to traditional models of adoption. First, it introduces the Eureka effect, which suggests that some types of usage challenges can actually increase satisfaction with the system--even if they decrease the user's perceived ease of use. Second, it expands on expectationdisconfirmation adoption models to carefully problematize when a user's expectations of a system are confirmed or disconfirmed and builds theory in the various liminal states in between preadoption and postadoption. Specifically, this paper builds the foundational base of theory and grounds initial hypotheses to support its two contributions to IS theory.