Factors Influencing Perceived Ease of Use and Usefulness of BIM Tools

Abstract

BIM Adoption in firms and projects requires considerable changes in design and construction processes. There has been ongoing research on exploring the drivers and barriers to BIM adoption. BIM Tools can be defined as all software tools and applications that can input information into/acquire information from semantically rich digital 3D building models, also known as Building Information Models (BIM). The aim of this study was to identify the impact of demographic, social, education-related, previous training-related, and profession-related factors on the perception of the ease of use and usefulness of BIM Tools for students and early career professionals. The main question of the research was defined as follows: "What factors influence the perception of the ease of use and usefulness of BIM tools for students and early career professionals?" The study involved a questionnaire survey with 227 participants to measure the impact of eleven different factors on the perception of the ease of use and usefulness of these tools. The findings suggest that both the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of BIM Tools are mostly stable and not substantially affected by most of the external factors. Among the factors that can influence the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness, Participation in a BIM Certification Training Program appeared to be the factor with the strongest influence, as it had a significant influence on both dimensions. Factors with weaker influence included Age Group, Gender, Being a Student or Not, Computing Habits, and Gaming Habits. The other five factors investigated appeared to have no influence on either dimension.