Acceptance and acceptability criteria: a literature review

One of the common issues related to tool use is to know why certain tools are chosen, accepted and used by users, while others are rejected. The aim of this paper is to find out if there are criteria related to the tool that can explain this decision. This manuscript proposes a literature review about acceptance and acceptability and presents the different historical approaches that have proposed an explanation to this issue (i.e. ergonomics approach, social approach, productivity-oriented approach, hedonic approach, user-experience approach), together with acceptance criteria listed in the field of psychology, ergonomics or cognitive science. Subsequently, a synthetic view and an interpretation of the evolution of the issue of tool acceptance are proposed, along with a new classification of acceptance and acceptability criteria, which consists in grouping criteria present in the literature in four meta-criteria.