Effect of ageing on perception of quality of IP-based personal communication applications

IP-based personal communication applications are popular around the world, especially, in developing countries. User perception of quality of service is one key concern for making a decision to adopt an IP application as a personal communication tool. However, user perception of quality is different among various groups even with the same intrinsic technical quality. Perception changes with many factors which include ageing. In this study we investigated the effect of ageing on user perception of quality of service of IP-based personal communications. We selected 5 related characteristics on IT usage to study their effect on user perception: IT knowledge, IT experience, physical expectancy, coping with unexpected events and ability to notice. The study randomly selected 101 subjects from population of different ages which include the Baby Boom Generation, Generation X, and Generation Y. The results confirm that the selected factors can differentiate users and reveal that there are 4 significant differences among groups of users which are based on Ward´s method, minimizing Sum of Square Errors (SSE) and analysis of variance. The four resulting groups are advanced users, moderate users, slow users, and practitioners. The study also finds that perception of quality of IP-based personal communication is similar for 3 of the user groups, only the practitioner group has different perception. We found in this study that it is possible to develop IP-based personal communication applications that will be well adopted by the majority of users.