Human-Centered Design and Digital Adoption
One of the most important considerations when creating a digital adoption strategy is understanding the impact it will have on the people using your systems and software. How will it impact their ability to get their job done? Will it create new challenges or open new opportunities? Even if the changes will make their lives easier, how can you teach an old dog new tricks? Humans are creatures of habit. Getting people to change their habits requires a combination of persistence and a keen understanding of what drives that person’s behavior.
What is Human-Centered Design?
At its core, human-centered design is empathy for the user. It is driving designs based on a deep understanding of the user’s way of thinking by being able to put yourself in their shoes. To develop this deep understanding requires spending time with users to see how they interact with software. Understanding the challenges that they face in completing their objectives. What activities take the most time or require them to consult outside help? What do they like and dislike about the software? Which activities do they delay rather than attacking them head-on? A human-centered design is one that maintains workflow elements that users enjoy, while creating simpler paths to complete tasks that users dread.
Why is Human-Centered Design important to Digital Adoption?
Change is never easy. In fact, it takes anywhere from two to eight months to take an activity or behavior and make it a habit. Once those habits are formed, they are hard to break. Even when people have the desire to learn a new behavior, they can often find it challenging. If they are used to working with one piece of software or completing a task in one way, then switching to a new software could leave them completely lost.
Beyond that, there is the forgetting curve, the often-ignored companion to the learning curve. The forgetting curve suggests that if we are taught something, then we forget 50-80% per day after the training has completed. By day 30, we retain only a few percent of what was taught. Because of this fact, training cannot be viewed as a one-time activity to be completed and left in the past. It must be an ongoing activity that continuously re-engages people to remind them of the information they were taught so that they can be successful in executing their tasks.
Understanding a person’s resistance to change and their propensity to forget what they are taught are important when trying to achieve digital adoption. A human-centered design takes these elements into account and addresses them so that natural human tendencies can be overcome leading to lasting changes in behavior. Additionally, by implementing a human-centered design, you can form a more personal relationship with your users. When they know that you understand and appreciate the challenges they are faced with, they are more likely to listen to and accept your guidance. You are not just an uninformed outsider, commenting on their effectiveness. You are a companion, a mentor. Guiding them to a shared goal.
WalkMe: Create with Users in Mind
The depth of customization possible with WalkMe’s digital adoption platform means that solutions engineers can implement human-centered designs that facilitate adoption of any software or digital tool. WalkMe’s seamless integration into your existing systems creates a consistent user experience across applications and further simplifies the users’ lives. In fact, you can create a fully branded experience that goes deeper than simple aesthetics. WalkMe is truly build around human-centered design thanks to its support for multiple learning styles and ability to offer differing solutions to a variety of generations. Whether your users are looking for video guides, checklists or quick start long form documents, any of these resources can be integrated directly into your software. There’s no need to abandon your old materials. You can give them new life by integrating them into WalkMe for ‘point of need’ information.
Human-centered design means not disrupting users when they are in the middle of a task. Strategic start points to ensure that users get off to the right start regardless of where they are on your webpage. Users who look for help mid-task can continue their process and do not have to restart from the beginning. Human-centered design means making the user’s task easier. Visual cues allow you to highlighting multiple fields at the same time to quickly provide users an overview of things they need to pay attention to or fill in. Human-centered design means preventing missteps. WalkMe’s error handling allows you to validate the data entered by a user to prevent a potential error. This ensure data integrity and avoids confusion on the part of the user.
Listen to Your Users
Lastly, human-centered design means listening to the people using your software. One of the best aspects of WalkMe is that it isn’t just a one-way tool that provides information and training to users of your software. WalkMe gives users a voice. In-app surveys allow users to give direct feedback on their experience. WalkMe Insights offers next-level data analytics that can provide a powerful window into how users are interacting with your software, highlighting problem spots where users are getting stuck.
When you build with the user in mind, you can not only help them solve their problems faster, you might help them solve things they didn’t know were a problem. This is powerful for building a lasting relationship that can have big impact on their perceptions of you and your future interactions with them.
