Social Enterprise Software
Driving market adoption with the Ease-of-Use program
In a Nutshell:
This case study focuses on the “Ease-of-Use” program that I designed and ran with my research team. I started this initiative in response to slow market adoption of the WebEx social product at the time. The success of the program with executive leadership made usefulness the primary focus for driving customer adoption of the WebEx Social product and in turn, improved market adoption.
The Chasm
In 2010, social media and Web 2.0 had crossed what Geoffrey Moore calls “the Chasm” of broad market adoption. Social media was in living rooms and on smart phones and everywhere in the personal lives of people. Increasingly, knowledge workers would bring these new ways of interacting with each other to the workplace.
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However, secure and compliant tools for online collaboration at work were not yet broadly adopted in the market or at Cisco.
We Created a Social Enterprise Platform for 60,000 Employees
Integrated Workforce Experience
With the employee collaboration technology group we created the "integrated workforce experience." Employees would keep up with activity feeds, form communities for collaboration with other employees and customers and choose to add corporate tools relevant to their job as small applications to their workspace.
Commercialization and Adoption Plateau
Based on the internal success of this project, Cisco turned it into a commercial product, called WebEx Social — and moved it from the internal employee collaboration group to Cisco product development.
Since we had the experience of designing, building and running the product internally with the Cisco workforce, the product development organization formed a close partnership
with us.
This partnership became more crucial as market adoption began to plateau after the first few commercial releases. How could we help the product group cross the chasm between
"Early Adopters" and "Early Majority"?
Lead with Human Behavior Insights
We had conducted a large ethnographic user study to understand how Cisco employees collaborated at work. From the study we concluded employee adoption of collaboration tools was based on how useful they were in meeting specific collaboration goals.
We convinced product leadership that market adoption of an enterprise collaboration product was based on organic user adoption. User adoption as primary factor for market adoption might seems obvious in hindsight. At the time, it was new to technical product managers who were used to relying customer organizations to mandate employee adoption of enterprise products.
Distill Behavior Patterns into Consistent User Goals
I tasked my research team to design a repeatable user study program that would measure usefulness against consistent user goals with each product release.
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We identified 9 broad user goals essential to successful online collaboration at work from our earlier ethnographic study.
We knew each product release would add new features, enabling new interactions. Since we wanted to measure usefulness consistently, we wrote moderator scripts according to the same user goals, while feature sets changed with releases.
Establish an Ease-of-Use Success Index
Track User Goal Success Rate Across Product Releases
We designed an ease-of-use index based on user task success rate, ease-of-use and satisfaction rating against each of the 9 user goals.
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The index enabled us to convey usefulness with a set of consistent metrics to an executive audience. Highlight videos from the user studies exponentially increased the appeal of the user adoption message.
Each study also had detailed screen-level usability findings and design recommendations we would share with the product development team on the ground. The product management team would wait for the study results to incorporate recommendations into the product roadmap.
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My Role:
I started at Cisco as a contractor responsible for the information architecture within the initiative that was to become WebEx Social. Within a 9 months, I was hired as a full-time manager of the UX research team for the employee collaboration technology group. In this role we designed and ran the Ease-of-Use program, which is the focus of this case study.
A year later, I was asked to lead the entire employee experience UX group, including research, design and program management.
With consistent user goals and usability metrics established we could provide trending across product releases. Shown above is an illustration of our chief usability metric, task success rate, across releases.
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With the ease-of-use program my team designed and ran we were able to influence product leadership and the product roadmap, resulting in increased market adoption of WebEx Social.
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