Usability does not automatically increase adoption
Time and time again, I've heard the same story... Teams get together, decide what will be best for their customers, run it through usability tests, build it, launch, and then... Nothing. No one uses it. I've been in these meetings. "We worked with the UX team, and ran it through usability, customers loved it!". Then why aren't they adopting it?
Here's the secret to why product development is difficult.
Just because something is easy to use, seamless, or visually attractive doesn't mean anyone will use it. To get anyone to change their behavior is difficult. To get them to use something new is difficult. Now you might say, "ah-ha! Marketing is the answer to get someone to use something new," but you would be wrong. Marketing can increase awareness, but until a customer sees value in what you're trying to get them to use, you're dead in the water.
Value is the key to adoption. The thing you're creating must be valuable enough to get someone to change what they've done 100 times before. Get them to try something new or different. It's the value that is the key to changing customer behavior.
So how do you determine value?
By genuinely getting to know your customers and applying experience strategy to obtain customer insights and translating them into prioritized opportunities. Does that sound hard? It is, but the alternative is wasted spend on products no one wants to use.
Product teams need to know you can actually answer questions like, "What would it take for someone to adopt this over what is available today?" -- this can be done utilizing modern User Experience techniques anyone can do. It doesn't need to be a guessing game or worse a shotgun approach where you add features or widgets and hope for the best -- also known as the "cross-your-fingers" approach to product development.
The business value for adoption is usually high, as is the cost of getting it wrong. If you're trying to move someone between channels, or reduce support or service calls, there is a good ROI for getting it right. And generally, creating a new channel can be costly. So weighing the two, you would want to spend some effort identifying the value you need to provide to achieve your goals.
For example, let's say you're working for a company trying to move people from calling into a service center to a fully digital self-service channel. Maybe your innovation team mentioned you should be using chatbots or your product team thinks you can just make your current self-serve portal a little more user friendly, or what if we sent out another email to raise awareness... You could be right, but it could also be any of a 100 different reasons that have nothing to do with usability or awareness. It could be that you don't understand your customer's emotions, perceptions, context, or current routine to break them from what they know today.
In my experience across organizations, I've heard many reasons that needed to be addressed beyond usability, ranging from:
Employees wanted the safety of knowing they completed their task with a live human vs. an online portal.
How could you make the experience mimic that safety of knowing your task is completed?
Companies had been blind to entire personas and usage for their products.
How can you get a better overview of your customer behaviors and segments?
Companies invent "happy paths" for customers that they don't currently have (and may never have).
How can you connect with new customer groups to determine value vs. current customers?
Product naming and pricing can be confusing to customers.
How can you test not the usability of the flow, but the usability of marketing?
Customers were looking to buy a home, not a mortgage.
How can you determine customer motivations and work towards solving real customer problems?
The above are real adoption challenges that need to be solved. Still, you wouldn't know any of them without running an experience strategy program to gain insight into customer or employee behavior.
Sometimes it is a simple usability issue, but it's often a lack of customer or employee understanding that leads teams down a path that customers won't adopt. Once you get that far, it's often hard to turn around, take a step back, and determine if you're solving the right customer problems.
Remember, as a product leader, you must coach your teams to spend proportional amounts of time understanding before building -- and when you do, watch your adoption problems disappear.