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How do you drive application adoption?

By Peter Fearey | Posted on January 24th, 2006

Getting people to change how they do their job is hard- people don’t like change. Yet, every QuickBase application creator is faced with the fact that they need to change people’s behavior in order to drive end user acceptance and adoption of their specific application. What amazes me is that we constantly hear about people’s successes here and how they were able to get 100 people to happily change to QuickBase "overnight". That brings me to some questions I’ve wanted to ask for a long time:
- What are some techniques you all use to drive adoption (e.g. users manuals, training, "manager mandates") and of all the different things you’ve tried, what’s worked best?
- What are the barriers new users have and that make adoption hard?
- What is the one thing that you believe we could do to make the entire process of rolling out an application to a team easier?

I guess what it all boils down to is that we know how important user adoption is when rolling out an application and we’d love to hear about what your best practices are. As you might imagine, getting the rest of the QuickBase team to use the product or a new application doesn’t end up being that hard for us so this isn’t something we have to grapple with much:->

About Peter Fearey

Anthony

My biggest problem is getting everyone to use the same processes. Despite my attempts to get an entire team trained, there are always a couple people not present that will be trained by somebody else who has a different idea of what certain fields are for. My best solution to this problem has been to review a lot of the records in the first couple of weeks and make sure that the usage is consistent across the team.

One thing I’ve found that doesn’t work is trying to provide training via e-mail. Each time that I’ve attempted that it doesn’t work out. I usually do a formal training and also provide a printed cheat sheet with the proper steps in case they forget.

I’m not sure what Quickbase can do to help. The help option on the fields is great, but getting the users to click it is the hard part. Maybe finding a way to make this easier for the user to see would be a solution. Like a bubble that pops up when they hover the field. That might be quite annoying as well though, so I guess I’m no help here

[Reply]
Anthony

My biggest problem is getting everyone to use the same processes. Despite my attempts to get an entire team trained, there are always a couple people not present that will be trained by somebody else who has a different idea of what certain fields are for. My best solution to this problem has been to review a lot of the records in the first couple of weeks and make sure that the usage is consistent across the team.

One thing I’ve found that doesn’t work is trying to provide training via e-mail. Each time that I’ve attempted that it doesn’t work out. I usually do a formal training and also provide a printed cheat sheet with the proper steps in case they forget.

I’m not sure what Quickbase can do to help. The help option on the fields is great, but getting the users to click it is the hard part. Maybe finding a way to make this easier for the user to see would be a solution. Like a bubble that pops up when they hover the field. That might be quite annoying as well though, so I guess I’m no help here

[Reply]
Roy Regalado

We just signed on today. Although I took about 25 out of the 30 day trial to do so, I was pretty excited about the product from day one. Really, the delay was caused by having to drive application adoption – this was initially going to be my department’s PM solution. However, my COO asked that I get comments from IT, then our Director of Projects, and then I pitched it to Sales. Not suprisingly, they all liked it, and it looks like we will have corporate-wide buy-in. The single most important factor I think in achieving adoption is actually using it in front of your team, showing how it all works, and the CUSTOMIZATION. Also, since our IT it off-site, I used Net Meeting to do a live demo for them – that did the trick. Also, since everyone knows I am the least “tech-savy” guy around, it looked like anyone could use this application. So, here we go… -

[Reply]
Roy Regalado

We just signed on today. Although I took about 25 out of the 30 day trial to do so, I was pretty excited about the product from day one. Really, the delay was caused by having to drive application adoption – this was initially going to be my department’s PM solution. However, my COO asked that I get comments from IT, then our Director of Projects, and then I pitched it to Sales. Not suprisingly, they all liked it, and it looks like we will have corporate-wide buy-in. The single most important factor I think in achieving adoption is actually using it in front of your team, showing how it all works, and the CUSTOMIZATION. Also, since our IT it off-site, I used Net Meeting to do a live demo for them – that did the trick. Also, since everyone knows I am the least “tech-savy” guy around, it looked like anyone could use this application. So, here we go… -

[Reply]

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