Get products adopted and keep them in use by designing deliberately for adoption and appropriation, turning prospects into committed users and unexpected uses into a driver of longevity and growth.
Distinguish between useful, usable, and used, and treat adoption as the true measure of design success rather than stopping at ease of use.
Map the dynamics of use across its cycle (pre-use, use, personalized use, and disuse) and locate where adoption and appropriation occur so as to extend a design's longevity in the market.
Turn prospects into users by designing for adoption across the pre-design, design, and launch-and-beyond phases of a product's life.
Distinguish the two senses of appropriation, managing copyright and cultural-sensitivity risks, while encouraging beneficial user repurposing and guarding against harmful or subversive uses.
Design for appropriation using seven practical guidelines: allowing interpretation, providing visibility of use, exposing intentions, supporting rather than controlling use, enabling plugability and configuration, encouraging sharing, and learning from appropriation.
Manage the path of use that carries users from no-use to use, adapting the approach for large, established companies versus smaller players that lack the same scale and reach.
Time adoption strategy to where a product sits in its life cycle and to the five adopter categories (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards), prioritizing innovators and early adopters to seed wider adoption.
Understand value from the customer's perspective by separating needs, wants, and demands, working with perceived value versus cost, and judging what level of value is enough to drive use.
Apply behavioral economics to design and marketing, including prospect theory, loss aversion, and the endowment effect, to frame risk, reduce perceived loss, and increase adoption and retention.
Influence the diffusion of innovation across its five stages (knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, confirmation) and recognize why diffusion sometimes fails.
Break into established markets by identifying and overcoming the common barriers to entry and driving a launch to the critical mass it needs to sustain itself.
Leverage value networks and social systems, such as thought leadership, digital social networks, and organizations, to strengthen product design and marketing and accelerate adoption.
Assess market ecology (the cultural, economic, political, social, and technological environments) to keep a product positioned for adoption and continued use.
Apply Alan Dix's lattice of value to create distinct value for different user groups and the shared value between them.
Tap the emotional drivers behind appropriation to understand why users repurpose designs and to encourage productive reuse.
Benefit from mashups and user-community content, and exploit the growing convergence of adoption and appropriation to make products more shareable, longer-lived, and faster-growing.
Design for ease of use by setting project-specific usability metrics and understanding ease of use from the user's perspective, while balancing it against commercial reality and functionality.
Apply Whitney Quesenbery's five characteristics of usability (effectiveness, efficiency, engagement, error tolerance, and ease of learning) and combine usability with utility to deliver products that are genuinely useful.
Evaluate and shape the full user experience using Peter Morville's seven UX factors (useful, usable, findable, credible, desirable, accessible, valuable) to produce products that compete and succeed in the market.
Diagnose why a product launch failed by analyzing it against the seven factors of user experience, so the same mistakes can be avoided on future projects.
