Progressive User Adoption

Mike Hughes describes how progressive user adoption strategy is an effective means of getting users to take advantage of advanced features of a product.

In short, the process for successfully promoting an innovation is as follows:

1. Tell how it is better than what a user is doing now.
2. Demonstrate that it is easy and consistent with what the user already knows or already does.
3. Let the user try it in safe, verifiable increments.

I found the following anecdote very enlightening on how people are afraid of change and how many times an initial reaction to a new and/or redesigned interface is usually negative, in many cases, just b/c it is different. Reminded me of a presentation by Andrei Herasimchuk, where he included a timeline of his experience and after every release of Photoshop or Illustrator he was accused of ruining the product.

I had an opportunity to see the third point in action, while observing a series of focus groups. The focus groups saw two versions of a user interface. One was very simple, but lacked a robust set of features, and the other offered a robust set of features that market research had indicated users wanted.

The facilitator demonstrated both user interfaces, then asked which one the members of the group preferred. All groups selected the simple one, adamantly claiming the other was too busy. But when asked what they would change about the user interface they’d preferred, they incrementally added functionality that eventually recreated the options they had initially rejected. Then, when shown the rejected user interface again, they enthusiastically endorsed it. Products that look overwhelming and busy, at first, often end up matching the level of functionality users ultimately want. They just need to get to that level in manageable steps—precisely the strategy of progressive user adoption.