Regardless of whether it’s an IT project, a software implementation or a digital tool designed to drive real-world business outcomes, you need a framework for measuring product and user adoption. But knowing how to measure adoption is only half the battle. The other half is interpreting and acting on the data you collect in order to achieve your goals.
1. User Intent: Identifying the intended use case(s) and problems the technology was designed to solve is essential for establishing clear KPIs around user behavior. These can form the basis for behavioral metrics and help businesses prioritize features that will have a positive impact on the end-user experience.
2. Compatibility and Integration: The ability of the new solution to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure and systems is also a critical factor in determining adoption rates. This can be assessed through market research or by leveraging existing data sources such as usage analytics.
3. Adoption Curve: Understanding the technology adoption curve is critical for assessing adoption rates accurately. It helps businesses plan marketing initiatives, identify key adoption barriers and opportunities, and determine how to best approach potential challengers.
4. Intent to Use: Ultimately, the purpose of any technology is to enable humans to perform better. This can be measured using behavioral metrics such as how often users are actively engaged with the new solution, how long they spend on each task and what functions they utilize most frequently.
Taking action on the right KPIs will enable your company to drive user adoption and deliver measurable, sustainable business outcomes. For example, JLL, one of the world’s foremost commercial real estate firms, used telemetry and engagement reports to identify high-usage users in each department, then turned them into change champions and technology evangelists. This helped them drive adoption of internal-facing market-research and data-visualization apps, resulting in higher ratings for both products.
