User Adoption is a big deal. You can implement and customize SharePoint until your hearts content but if your users are scared of it, don’t like change or simply find it too hard to learn and find stuff, it will fail. This is often one of the hardest challenges there is.
I would love to hear what techniques you use specifically around these areas. Please use some (or all) of these questions to give inspiration :
- Did you get end-users involved in the design and implementation phases ?
- Did you train the users and if so, how ? (Videos, residential, train the trainer ?)
- If you were replacing something they used to have with SharePoint, how did you manage the change ?
- Do you measure on-going satisfaction ?
- What was your biggest challenge when implementing, what barriers did you over come ?
- Did you have a killer app, or business process that made it “all worth while ?”
- How do your users find out more information on how to do things, where’s the community ?
- During implementation, what areas did you spend lot’s of time on to get right ? (e.g Search, Info architecture, etc).
- What 3rd party apps did you buy to help you ?
If you know of a tool / resource, please add it here : http://list.ly/list/7fR-sharepoint-usability-tools
Indeed Susan,
Branding & images are very important and here we can think a bit out of the box; when you mix them the result could be….. a sexy adoption tool consisting in a carousel of images with tool-tips placed (kind of helps, tips & tricks); that will leave a strong impression;)
Yes Dan you are right branding is important. Something I am also busy with explaining always.
will even create a training module, branding and images. Nothing worse than having a page destroyed by a bad image. As I do a lot of photography I am able to give them hints and tips on what to think about.
Usually people like images so it goes down well.
And yes Paul for sure users buy-in. the domino effect works and does the trick with that one.
And lots of attention, patience and humor.
I like a lot of the discussion this has generated, and I agree with much of it. I would like to add that branding is an important tool that can give the end-user an “at-home” feeling. It is unfortunate that branding is man times labelled as decorative, and not taken as seriously as it should when discussing end-user adoption.
In a large enterprise identifying the group champion is key. They tend to drive innovation and change. I agree with Susan that training is very important to build confidence in making any update to a business process. Live training and demo’s tend to be successful.
When presenting new design ideas I try to make it about ‘me’. Where ‘me’ may be customized dashboards for the end user, site designer reporting or support techniques for future people who support the site.
