FACT CHECKED
Understanding digital adoption principles is essential for improving user adoption outcomes and metrics.
The adoption process has become a core function in every business, applying to both consumers and business users.
Product creators, for instance, must understand and improve digital adoption because adoption impacts customer acquisition, retention, and lifetime value.
Digital adoption is also crucial for enterprises, however, since adoption programs impact employee performance, productivity, and proficiency, among other areas.
Below, we’ll cover a few of the most important digital adoption principles that apply to both business users and consumers.
Boost Adoption Outcomes with these 5 Digital Adoption Principles
Here are five principles to focus on when developing a structured digital adoption plan:
Simplicity
Simple user experiences are best.
The less mental effort users need to expend, the easier it will be for them to adopt and learn new products.
The concept of mental effort is also known as cognitive load and is widely applied in design fields.
Too much cognitive load fatigues and frustrates users and impedes learning, which is why it is important to reduce that load as much as possible.
In the context of digital adoption, this means:
- Quickly introducing software through product tours
- Focusing only on practical skills during training
- Using modern technology, such as AI, to boost engagement
Adhering to methods such as these can significantly improve the user experience and, as a result, increase engagement and productivity.
User-Centrism
User-centered design is a core method in design thinking and, like simplicity, it should be a core strategy in any digital adoption program.
User-centric approaches are based on processes such as:
- Continually measuring user data
- Learning from that information
- Quickly applying those insights to future iterations of a product or process
A user-centered approach such as this is closely related to modern business practices such as lean and agile. These methodologies put users at the center of the design process, with the aim of reducing waste, shrinking product development time, and improving the user experience.
Adoption, like any other business process, can benefit from such user-centered business processes.
Basing processes and designs around users’ actual needs, after all, ensures that those processes are more relevant and useful to the end user, regardless of whether those users are in-house employees or consumers.
Personalization
Marketers have long recognized the need to personalize marketing and sales messaging.
Today, digital technology has vastly improved companies’ ability to personalize their products and services.
Personalization boosts adoption results for a number of reasons:
- Personalized content is more relevant to the individual user, which makes the user more invested and engaged in the adoption process
- When users receive training that is more relevant to their personal situation, they will be more productive
- Since personalized training is more useful, it reduces training costs
Using modern digital adoption tools, such as digital adoption platforms (DAPs), it will be much easier to personalize content and maximize user productivity.
Data-Driven
In the digital era, data should be used to inform and guide all business endeavors, including digital adoption and transformation efforts.
Data-driven processes, after all, offer a number of advantages over processes uninformed by data:
- Data helps business professionals stay tuned into real-world information, rather than preconceived notions or emotions
- Data-driven processes are more efficient, productive, and effective than those that don’t use data
- In the contemporary business landscape, data offers a competitive advantage
Ultimately, any company that wants to keep up in the current economy will need to leverage data as much as possible.
When using data to inform adoption efforts, companies will see upticks in key adoption metrics, such as engagement, satisfaction, and performance.
Goal-Oriented
To produce measurable outcomes, adoption programs should be goal-oriented and well-structured.
Taking a structured, goal-oriented approach to digital adoption means:
- Understanding the key phases of digital adoption, such as user onboarding and training
- Setting clear goals for the program and each stage of the journey, such as reducing user churn or increasing user proficiency by a certain margin
- Tying those goals to measurable objectives, metrics, and KPIs, which enables adoption specialists to measure and understand their performance through data
- Designing the adoption process around user-centered and data-driven approaches, such as continual measurement, learning, and improvement, as mentioned above
With a structured approach to adoption, specialists will be able to learn what works and what doesn’t. And, just as importantly, they will be able to see and demonstrate the bottom-line ROI of their efforts.
Final Thoughts
In today’s economy, the importance of digital adoption cannot be understated.
After all, continual organizational change has become the norm, and in order to stay relevant, organizations must constantly implement new digital tools, new ways of working, and new business strategies.
At the same time, employees must be able to continually adapt to these changes and learn new skills.
Digital adoption, therefore, is quickly becoming mandatory for any company that wants to remain competitive and profitable.
