Innovation Labs' "Product Adoption" series explains what product adoption means, how to build a fanbase and why you should start your adoption and marketing activities right at the beginning of your project.
Back in June In Hand became one of the last Labs products to launch. The team had followed a painstaking process of skilling up their young people to get hands on with the app design process. It had taken time and gone against the grain of ‘fail fast’ and ‘launch and learn’ principles.
However, it was worth the wait.
In just 4 months InHand has accelerated its adoption and really come to the fore as one of the best new mental health apps on the market. They’ve been featured on [Read more…]
It turns out Nick Hornby was on to something with his novel High Fidelity, the tale of a lovelorn bloke who deals with his emotions by obsessively cataloguing his record collection. Having the freedom to experiment and innovate with different types of content through Madly in Love has taught us many things, but the most outstanding discovery is that Spotify playlists help young men find a voice when other emotional outlets seem too daunting. [Read more…]
How do you motivate your target audience to market your product? The answer – co-design a marketing campaign with them. How do you do that? Set them a campaign challenge activity that’s fun, time-bound and competitive.
At YouthNet, we invited 12 Nottingham students to compete in a campaign challenge with a mission to improve reach for our flagship website, TheSite.org.
All in just two and a half hours. [Read more…]
So you’ve learnt about product adoption and got your first few fans. How many?
2? 7? 30? 200?
The numbers don’t matter. If you’ve got two and you don’t do the right things with them then they won’t bring along their friends.
And if you’ve got 200 and you don’t do the right things with them then they will dwindle away.
You see, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have, it’s what you do with them that counts. So, here’s what to do to with them.
Do these things and your fans will stay loyal, share your product and bring their friends to the party. [Read more…]
Product adoption is just marketing, right?
Wrong.
Product adoption is more about designing a usable product, then?
Wrong.
Product adoption is about the product, the experience you create around it and the relationships that people build with it – the relationships they build as they become your fans.
It’s about how you nurture and communicate with your fans, and how you cultivate stories and discussion about your product.
If you get it right then it’ll make your great product fly.
If you get it wrong then no matter how great your product is it’ll probably sink. [Read more…]
Ian Drysdale from Good Gym talks about product adoption and the importance of sharing stories to build users.
Ian mentions Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends are the Key to Influence on the Social Web, a useful book on how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks. It shows you how to build your product around social behavior, and create products that people tell their friends about.
Tom Taylor from NewspaperClub.com talks about how they took an idea and turned it into a well-used product using blogging, authentically and honestly, to build interest and a fan base before they launched.
Paul Miller from Bethnal Green Ventures shares some of his advice and experience of building product adoption among social apps.
Getting users or customers to use new technology can be a real challenge.
It’s one thing to have a great idea.
It’s another thing to turn it into a great product.
Its another thing altogether to help people learn and decide if, how and when to use and adopt it as theirs.
At last month’s Labs Meetup we talked about the challenges of understanding how the product adoption process might work for mental health apps and young people with mental health issues. What stages do users go through when deciding whether to adopt a product and how can projects support these stages? [Read more…]
How many features are you planning for your app or website?
Whether you’re planning only 2-3, or as many as 23 the chances are that if you don’t find the one killer feature that will make it stand on its own then it’s likely to fail. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is one way of helping you learn what that feature is, as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible. [Read more…]
