3 Beliefs of User Adoption

Did you know that when salmon swim upstream, they can jump up to 8 feet high to overcome obstacles like waterfalls and rapids? But humans are not salmon, we can not jump 8 feed high, we have better ways of getting over obstacles, and we don’t really like to swim upstream. This is one of the major lessons I learned over my career, and one of the reasons Foqal started out in the Slack atmosphere - when you want to get adoption of your product, service, or company initiative, swim with the stream.

A few days ago, we heard the story of how our customers realized they had to buy from us. While testing Foqal, this customer installed the Foqal Agent bot in the #helpdesk-it Slack channel. During the free trial, an employee found this helpdesk channel, found the Foqal bot, and created a request for the IT team before the bot was even made public. The process of creating tickets with Foqal Agent is so easy and frictionless, that it’s almost impossible for a employees not to use it. Because of this ease of use, customers constantly share how adoption inside the company is dead simple. Most of our customers don’t even perform any change management when introducing Foqal.

To share how we got here, lets talk about our 3 beliefs on adoption and how we utilized each when building Foqal Agent:

1. Swim with the stream

Figure out the current behaviors of your users and adapt. For Foqal, we found that a lot of our users are already using Slack. When a user needs help, they simply go into a Slack channel and ask a question. This is why we started with Threaded mode, a customer does not have to change their behavior - as soon as they type in a message in a Slack channel, a ticket is automatically created the customer is notified. With threaded mode we found an existing pattern that customers are very comfortable with and simply altered our application around their existing workflow. Adoption was immediate because the user behavior did not change.

2. Make incremental changes

If you are always optimizing for people’s existing workflows, you often have to make the wrong tradeoff between what is easier for adoption and what is best for the user or product. Just because you found a user behavior that you can adopt to, does not mean that user behavior can not be changed.

Early on, we saw that if we could build an on-Slack ticketing system, customers would be thrilled. However, we quickly discovered the limitations of the Slack platform and the kind of experience possible. If we built a separate web application from the start, getting user adoption would have been really difficult. For that reason, we started with a limited Slack interface that users would love, but then started introducing features and experiences only available in the web application. This allows users to stay in the Slack application, but over time find themselves more and more in the web interface.

If you want to change users behavior, do it a little bit at a time. Build on users’ existing workflows, but invite them to make a small change. Over time, these changes add up. Think about the user journey and their workflow when they first sign up to your desired change. What are the steps required along the way?

3. Or just be 10x better

At this point, you are probably thinking of a product or service which made you change your workflow overnight. Something that required a major shift in behavior, but adoption was still easy. For example - when you first started driving a car instead of riding a bike, when you started using ChatGPT instead of Google to find answers, when you started using Doordash instead of contacting the restaurant directly. In each of these cases, the new product is perceived as a 10x or more improvement compared to the status quo. If you can create an experience that is perceived by the user as a 10x improvement compared to their existing workflow, you can more-easily swim upstream and make bold changes.

Because Foqal Automations allow IT teams to automate large parts of their workflows, they are seen by many users as a 10x improvement to their current workflows. However configuring these workflows can get complicated in a large enough organization. Foqal customers will often go through a bigger learning curve understanding the features of Foqal Automations because these Automations can improve their workflows, save time, and reduce tickets by 10x compared to before.

So whats the point? Try to make peoples’ life easier. Don’t change their workflow but instead embrace it, make small improvements to it until you see the desired effect. And when none of that works, make a product that improves peoples’ workflow by 10x!