Corporate app adoption
Thoughts from February 2015, after being asked to adopt Trello (again).
Twice, I’ve been asked to use Trello for work. Once: BananaScrum, Slack, Basecamp, Google Hangouts and Box. And, repeatedly of course, Outlook Express and Google Drive.
Some of those, my teammates and I actually used for many projects (e.g. Google Drive), but more often than not, our usage just died away.
I took a step back and looked at the patterns of what made us use and not use products over time.
These are the three (3) things I learned about adopting corporate apps.
1) Products are adopted (more) easily when there’s a current user base that’s familiar with the features and already uses them in a way that’s integral to projects.
Having a current user base who already integrated the app in their workflow sets up real consequences for not onboarding yourself.
i.e. Say you don’t have your e-mail set-up after your first two weeks of work, then you’re sure to miss out on information you need for projects to run.
It’s usage by necessity.
TANGIBLE CONSEQUENCES + ON-HAND USAGE TIPS = Experimentation (Triggers + Use Cases)
2) If only one among the whole team is familiar with the product, usage can be triggered by a situation where there is no choice but to use it with others.
But that has to be supported by a lot of information at hand about how to use the product.
One of our project managers set a Google Hangout for all of us to work remotely - this forced us to go through the main barrier for use: Not understanding what the features are and how to use them.
A whole half hour of Google-ing, registering, coordinating on Facebook messenger just to figure out how to use Google Hangouts ensued.
But, at least for the next scheduled interactions, we had already gotten over the first hurdle.
3) Since necessity + familiarity are crucial to adoption of corporate applications, if and when you’re making a team use something “for fun” — this means you have to support it with:
- potential use cases (i.e. what is it best for, since they probably won’t explore and adopt a corporate app for fun), and
- probably trigger it with an “event” or task that makes the app critical to performing it.
Originally written: February 24, 2015