Andrew McAfee’s article on the barriers to adoption of new technologies/tools is superb, and jarringly prescient:
“The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what’s currently out there.”
Basically, the newnew thing has to be 9 times as good for people to use it instead of their current tool.
The example is new social software vs. email.
I’ve definitely lived this experience:
bq. “There are, it seems, two broad strategies. Enterprise 2.0 technologists can try to increase the perceived benefits of their technologies (in other words, what the user feels she’s getting), or lower their perceived costs and drawbacks (what the user feels she’ll be giving up). Demos and training are part of the former strategy, but they feel like weak measures. Stronger ones are a clear explanation of what the technology does, network effects, peer pressure, word of mouth, and an extremely effective user interface and layout.”
I agree, a pleasing, easy user-interface is critical. I spent a long time crafting a wiki skin and layout to make it as ‘professional looking’ as possible, and peer pressure was definitely a key contribution in the successful wiki takeup in one of my client’s sites.
But I don’t think fighting email is a wise strategy – the problem of email simply isn’t apparent to most people (or rather the pain is in small chunks – searching, getting new people up to speed, versioning failures, etc.).
Email is an amazing notification and small file transfer mechanism – and everything I’m thinking about and/or designing uses email as an attention/notification mechanism.
And of course, email addresses have rather useful feature of being unique, so you can use them as UID’s in applications…
I guess this kind of follows Dave Winer’s point:
bq. “I promised I’d explain once and for all why it’s hopeless to “try to get the users” to use social bookmarking software unless they’re already using it. Here’s why: I don’t know. But I do know it never works. It’s so bad that when I try to solve the problem (I’m a geek, so I fall into this trap myself, can’t help it), I hack at making it easy and painless, figuring it’s a user interface problem (if you’re a geek you’re nodding your head right now, right?) but when I make it so easy anyone would have to do it, not only doesn’t anyone else do it, I don’t even do it myself! Why? As I said, I don’t know! Makes no sense to me at all. But there you are.”