Product Adoption

Your constantly-updated definition of Product Adoption and collection of videos and articles

What is Product Adoption?

The design process has an objective. It's not to create usable and useful products (though these are both important considerations when designing products), but rather to create products people use. Adoption is the process by which people become users of a product, and it is adoption which will enable users to discover that a product is usable and useful and enable them to become long-term users of a product.

Product adoption is one of the most important business goals. If your product is adopted, you create a customer base and gain a position within the market. Product adoption marks the transition between the product being unknown and foreign to becoming used and welcomed by the users.

Product adoption depends on the particular user. There are different types of adopters within your potential customer base, and each has different values.

The basic types of adopters can be divided into 5 groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.

The innovators and the early adopters are the first groups to show interest in adopting the new product. The laggards are the most resistant to change and are the last to welcome any new innovation or change into their lives.

Literature on Product Adoption

Here’s the entire UX literature on Product Adoption by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Product Adoption

Take a deep dive into Product Adoption with our course Get Your Product Used: Adoption and Appropriation .

Designing for user experience and usability is not enough. If products are not used—and it doesn’t matter how good they are—they will be consigned to the trash can of history.

Sony’s Betamax, Coca-Cola’s New Coke, Pepsi’s Crystal Pepsi, and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe are among the most famous products which made it into production but failed to wow their audiences, according to Business Insider. In fact, Harvard Business Review dedicated a long piece to “Why most product launches fail”—so it’s not just big brands that aren’t getting their design process right but a lot of businesses and individuals, too.

So, what is the way forward? Well, once you’re sure that the user experience and usability of your product work the way you want them to, you’ve got to get your designs adopted by users (i.e., they have to start using them). Ideally, you want them to appropriate your designs, too; you want the users to start using your designs in ways you didn’t intend or foresee. How do we get our designs adopted and appropriated? We design for adoption and appropriation.

This course is presented by Alan Dix, a former professor at Lancaster University in the UK and a world-renowned authority in Human-Computer Interaction. Alan is also the author the university-level textbook “Human-Computer Interaction.” It is a short course designed to help you master the concepts and practice of designing for adoption and appropriation. It contains all the basics to get you started on this path and the practical tips to implement the ideas. Alan blends theory and practice to ensure you get to grips with these essential design processes.

All open-source articles on Product Adoption

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