Benchmarking of usability and user experience: Electronic table games against electronic gaming machines at casinos

Electronic gaming machines (EGMs), emulating mechanical slot machines, were the first and most quintessential category of electronic gambling equipment at casinos. Usability and user experience evaluation of EGMs, as information systems, can often serve as a baseline against which comparable evaluation of other younger electronic gambling equipment, also as information systems, can be benchmarked. In contrast, electronic table games (ETGs), being electronic versions of standard, traditional table games, are usually regarded as comparatively new-fangled equipment vis-à-vis EGMs. This article focuses on benchmarking gamblers' perceived usability of and user experience with ETGs against EGMs. Adopting the major constructs of the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) along with the additional construct "trust"and operationalizing these constructs in accordance with the literature, such constructs as "perceived ease of use", "perceived usefulness", "perceived risk", "attitude", "social influence", "innovativeness", "stress to use a technology"and "trust"in respect of ETGs' and EGMs' perceived usability and user experience were rated by n = 694 respondents in a questionnaire survey conducted in late 2022 in Macao. Paired-samples t-tests were applied to each constructs' ratings of ETGs and EGMs. It was found that of all these constructs, only the population mean differences in the ratings of constructs "perceived risk"and "attitude"between ETGs and EGMs were greater than zero. The implication is that among the various perspectives of perceived usability and user experience, only the risk prevention of and the attitude towards existing ETGs' designs outperform the counterparts of existing EGM's designs, which can often be treated as the baseline for such benchmarking. This article also purports to a speculative reason for such findings. In conclusion, not only are much younger ETGs by no means trounced by long-standing EGMs in terms of gamblers' perceived usability and user experience but also ETGs have also surpassed EGMs in the perspectives of risk prevention and the attitude towards such electronic gambling equipment. This article advises that further research be undertaken to investigate the underlying reason for the above findings, especially, whether the speculative reason proposed in this article is true.