Regardless of one’s attitude to the pace of technological change, one thing remains true: you can only drive digital transformation at the pace that its intended users can understand it.
Amongst society there are always those ‘early adopters’ who absolutely adore new technology advances and actively welcome updates to their devices and the latest software iterations.
Then there are those who take the view that if “something isn’t broke, don’t fix it” – they’ll only begrudgingly update their devices and adopt new technologies when forced to do so – usually when some legacy technology simply stops working due to operating system incompatibilities.
We can’t simply ignore the desires and dislikes of this latter group of people – their opinion is perfectly valid. Some people’s brains just work in different ways to others – there are those that see change as a welcome opportunity, others see it as a hurdle to hinder their accustomed routines.
In order to better understand why some people are put off by digital adoption and transformation, both in their working lives and leisure time, we must examine what issues cause problems as opposed to those that make everything smoother.
Clearly, nobody would ever object to digital adoption and progress if the processes involved turned out to be completely effortless. In all probability, it’s the onerous task of people having to learn new methods of working in the face of updated tech that causes the most irritation.
So what if nearly all the hard work and frustrating routine changes could be taken out of the process of adopting, and adapting to, new technology? That’s where digital adoption platforms become invaluable.
Don’t look back in anger
Many people get angry whenever they are forced to change from their accustomed routines. Whether it’s a new remote control that comes with a Smart TV or a new system introduced at work, changes that are thrust upon people can make them irritated, even angry; causing phones to be thrown at walls and office waste paper baskets to be kicked in frustration.
Imagine if that frustration could be instantly taken away by a digital adoption platform (DAP), which would proactively offer assistance to software users before they got into problematic situations. A DAP isn’t really a platform of itself. It acts like a secondary layer that runs alongside its primary software partner, teaching users how to adapt to unfamiliar workflow patterns.
The crucial difference between artificial intelligence (AI)-driven DAPs and simple “tooltips” is in the AI’s way of becoming accustomed to each software user’s learning style – or, in effect, the way that individual people make common mistakes.
The most patient of teachers, only there when required
Let’s take a real world but fictional example of where a DAP could be extremely useful. Imagine you are a WordPress expert running a small creative agency to help small businesses with their digital marketing.
You may have managed to train a couple of people at one of your client’s offices to perform basic WordPress (WP) editing. They can create new posts, add text, add media to their site library, add featured images, and share their published posts on social media via widgets and icons. All good. You’re sensible enough to not allow them full access permissions to every part of their WP platform so they can’t break anything.
As a result of your careful training and setup, you hardly ever hear from your client unless a major update or rebrand is required. But what happens when WP updates itself so that the very process of creating and editing posts changes fundamentally. This happened a few years back in 2018, when the “Classic” WP editor interface went from Tiny MCE to Gutenberg. Overnight, a lot of people simply didn’t know where to start in creating a new post or editing an existing one.
Those two people you trained would now need a lot of extra input and would probably be on the phone asking for help with WP several times per day.
But if a DAP were to be installed alongside a WP package, as soon as the operator started to create an erroneous workflow, the DAP would intervene with on-screen messages. Crucially, the messages would be unique for different operators because the DAP works on a personal account basis.
When Jim from the marketing department logs onto the company’s WP website dashboard – he might be accustomed to editing in Tiny MCE. He tries to add a “horizontal ruler” below his text, but the facility suddenly seems to be unavailable. The DAP might suggest “Hey Jim – to add a horizontal ruler, create a new block and use that block as the ruler container…”
The beauty of DAPS is their adaptability. If Jim’s colleague Sarah logged on to her workstation to edit a WP post, the DAP would “know” from Sarah’s workflow history that she was already proficient at the Gutenberg editing process – so the DAP would remain silent and unobtrusive until required. For example – Sarah might upload a full resolution 25Mb image to the WP media library, then add it to a post to display at only 600 pixels width. This obviously takes up a large and unrequired amount of data on the company server.
A DAP would prompt Sarah to resize her image in Photoshop to, say, 1200 pixels wide before uploading it. The DAP would not interrupt Sarah until she had used an inappropriately sized image at least once, then it would recognize her common mistake and advise her to change her methods. The best part is that once Sarah had stopped uploading excessively large images, the DAP would not prompt her until she repeated the error again.
In these ways, you can see how DAPs are like having a knowledgeable , friendly and helpful experienced colleague sitting by your side all the time – but they only intercede when necessary. The perfect teacher, only there when you need them, yet they seem to know magically whenever that might be!
Daps – soon to be as common as nuts and bolts
The only reason that DAPs haven’t been in common use before now is the relatively recent advent of AI, despite early teething troubles with its presentation of the English language.
Until the computing power of AI was available, especially for software as a service (SaaS) packages, the complexity of each individual software user’s account being tracked for their discrete common mistakes and clunky workflows would have been impossible.
But now AI has become more efficient, along with cloud computing having reached much faster speeds at affordable subscription prices, there’s no reason why DAPs shouldn’t come as standard with everything, like nuts and bolts that fix your TV to its stand – from the soundbar remote control via online shopping to the address book on your smartphone – DAPs will soon take all the pain and tears away from digital adoption.
Even the most diehard cynic will soon be able to enjoy a trouble-free relationship with technology at work and at home. That’s got to be a win/win for software developers, UX designers and customers themselves.
