Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Jul

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Categories: Documentation & Help Manuals, Technical Communication/Writing, Useful Resources

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Technology Adoption Lifecycle
Technology Adoption Lifecycle and Technical Writing

The technology adoption lifecycle is a model used to explain how people respond to technological innovation and products.

From Wikipedia:

The technology adoption lifecycle model describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or “bell curve.” The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called “innovators,” followed by “early adopters.” Next come the early and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called “laggards.”

Basically, technology users are separated into five categories:

Innovators—Innovators are people who are committed to new technology. Innovators are the first to buy into a new technology. These are the people who line up for hours or even days to purchase iPhones and Wiis when they first come out. The total market size for innovators is very small. Innovators often pay a high price to acquire new technology. They also are the people who give the stamp of approval and share about the new technology with others.
Early Adopters—Early adopters hear what innovators have to say about new technology and follow suit. Early adopters are a little more conservative than the innovators but open to new ideas and innovation. They see technology as tools to solve problems. They adopt new technology and use it to exploit competitive advantage.
Early Majority—Early majority adopts new technology after a proven track record. Companies, businesses, and infrastructures purchase new technology not for the sake of innovation but to keep up with the competitive edge.
Late Majority—Late majority waits until the technology is well tested, fully accepted, and affordable. This group of people have high expectations and expect to get their values worth out of the technology.
Laggards—Laggards are people who challenge all the hype about new technology from the very beginning to the end. They are pessimistic and often critical of new technology. Laggards are reluctant to adopt technology and difficult to persuade.

This model explains consumer behavior and is used as a marketing strategy to introduce new technology to the market.

technology adoption lifecycle

From Information Technology Blog:

The Marketing Strategy
With these customer segments in mind, the typical approach is to seed new products with the innovators so they can help educate the early adopters. When the early adopter’s are interested, do everything that is possible to make them happy as they will then serve as references for the early majority which is the group where most of the money is made from a new product or service. Then leverage the success with this large group so that the product matures and stabilizes enough to be of interest to the late adopters. All the while, ignore the laggards and their skepticism.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm

Unfortunately, this model is flawed because there’s a gap between early adopters and early majorities that Geoffrey Moore explored and wrote about in his book, “Crossing the Chasm.”

Moore renamed the five categories of technology adoption to technology enthusiasts (innovators), visionaries (early adopters), pragmatists (early majority), conservatives (late majority), and skeptics (laggards).

chasm

The notion of Moore’s books is that the five groups of people adopt technology and innovations for different reasons. These differences create a chasm between the visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority) that explains why many technology startups fail. Visionaries and pragmatists have different expectations and unless there’s something to bridge the gap, new technology will fail to gain popular acceptance.

Technology Adoption Life Cycle and Technical Writing

So what does this technology adoption lifecycle have to do with technical writing? Everything. When I was writing a documentation plan for the new 1.0 documentation project I am currently working on, I had to think about this technology adoption lifecycle model and its implications. After all, help manuals are meant for end-users to read so if technical writers don’t know or understand who their end-users are, then the help manuals is probably not going to be very useful.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring this a little more. To be continued . . .

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