Barriers to Adoption and How to Uncover Them

Accessibility

A product could potentially provide great value, but be completely irrelevant if it’s inaccessible to consumers. It’s important to ensure consumers can quickly benefit from your product’s value. Accessibility consists of two components: convenience and usability. Ensuring users can quickly and easily make use of your product ensures that it does not lose its value through a poorly designed user interface or delivery model.

Solar panels are an excellent example of a product that has had slow adoption because of its poor accessibility. The amount of work correctly installing and maintaining solar panels requires has significantly slowed their adoption—despite their long-term financial benefits. Usability testing is an important component of product development and provides an excellent measure of accessibility. Make sure to incorporate your delivery model into your usability testing—for example, test software or hardware installation or finding and purchasing an item online or in a store. It is often helpful to include evaluations of perceived value, confidence, and trust when performing usability testing. In this way, you can acquire up-to-date feedback on all of these adoption variables.

An interesting phenomenon regarding accessibility is the extent to which the level of consumers’ need for the value a product provides can affect its degree of adoption. People are highly tolerant of products that provide essential value—such as financial systems like ATMs, which are notoriously inaccessible because they can be difficult to find. To accomplish things they deem to be important, people tend to be willing to suffer through challenges. On the other hand, people tend to be extremely intolerant of inaccessibility when considering products that provide value they view as optional—such as entertainment products. People typically abandon a product with a difficult user interface quickly if they judge the product’s value to be unimportant or easily replaceable.

Regardless of what type of product you are developing, you should always seek to maximize accessibility. In the marketplace, a product that is more accessible to users can easily edge out another product that offers the same essential value, but has poor accessibility.

Trust

Finally, trust refers to whether participants and customers feel a product is safe to use. Trust might be a factor in products that involve some physical risk—motorcycles, for instance—or threaten a user’s privacy—such as Web sites like Facebook. It’s important to keep this in mind when designing an interaction model for a new product or service. Consider what you are asking users to do and whether there is anything with which they might feel uncomfortable.

For example, if you are developing a mobile app that requires knowing a user’s current location, it’s important to assess whether users would feel comfortable making that information known. If people are already providing the same information to other apps—in this case, to apps like foursquare—you can safely assume that at least part of your potential user population has become accustomed to providing that information. It’s still important to assess whether the market you are targeting is among those in which people are typically comfortable providing personal information. In addition, you must also determine whether any aspects of your visual design or messaging are hampering trust.

One common mistake we see quite often is overstating a product’s value proposition in its brand message. People have learned to distrust things that sound too good to be true or seem to promise magic solutions to difficult problems. One way to combat this perception is to immediately give users some understanding of how your product or service works. Disclosure goes a long way toward establishing trust, and people tend to trust things they feel they understand.

Make sure you test your messaging with research participants to ensure it provides some understanding of how a product works, as well as what value it provides. The simplest way to do this is to ask participants to read your Web site content, then describe how the product would provide the promised value. If participants can accurately describe how the product works, you have done a good job with your messaging. To further test whether participants trust the product, ask them to use their personal information during testing. If they hesitate, ask them why. They will usually let you know when they are uncomfortable providing personal information.

Conclusion

Adoption is essential to the long-term success of products and brands. When products enjoy high adoption rates, successor products typically follow, building upon the success of their predecessors. Such products tend to become icons like the Nintendo Game Boy or Apple iPod.

To achieve significant adoption, you must ensure your product offers a clear and compelling value proposition, users have confidence your product would actually provide that value, your product’s value is accessible without a great deal of difficulty, and users feel its value is worth any risks its adoption might involve. If you can accurately assess each of these variables, you will be in a good position to determine the right direction to take with your product.

Of course, there are other variables you must also take into account when assessing the likely success of your product—such as its competition—but if you can successfully manage all of these admittedly challenging variables, you’ll give your product its best chance of achieving a high rate of adoption.