Keeping Software Users on Board - Increasing Continuance Intention Through Incremental Feature Updates

Although feature updates are a ubiquitous phenomenon in both professional and private IT usage, they have to date received little attention in the IS post-adoption literature. Drawing on expectation-confirmation theory and the IS continuance literature, we investigate whether, when and how incremental feature updates affect users’ continuance intentions (CI). Based on a controlled laboratory experiment, we find a positive effect of feature updates on users’ CI. According to this effect, software vendors can increase their users’ CI by delivering updates incrementally rather than providing the entire feature set right with the first release. However, we also find that CI diminishes when the number of updates exceeds a tipping point in a given timeframe, disclosing update frequency as crucial boundary condition. Furthermore, we unveil that the beneficial effect of feature updates on CI operates through positive disconfirmation of expectations, resulting in increased user satisfaction. Implications for research and practice as well as directions for future research are discussed