If you build it, will they come?

I’ve found that newer product managers often have a difficult time predicting consumer adoption for a new feature. It’s easy to overestimate the percentage of consumer adoption when you’re excited about a feature, and even asking the consumers isn’t always helpful. (When someone asks you “do you want X?”, and X is in the abstract, wouldn’t you say yes?)

I like to pose the framework of a friction coefficient. It looks like this:

Pain or Perceived Reward - Friction = % Adoption

To illustrate:

• Consumer is actively on fire (Pain = 100)
• You are handing him/her a turned-on hose with a big “FREE” sign on it (Friction = 0)
• = 100% adoption. Congratulations! 100% of on-fire consumers will accept your hose. (Start selling those garden hose ads.)

or:

• Consumer sees a $20 bill lying on the street (Perceived Reward = 100)
• There are no people, businesses, or homes in sight that it might have come from (Friction = 0)
• = 100% adoption. Congratulations! 100% of guilt-free consumers will take your money. (Go back in time to 1999 and start a dot-com company.)

Let’s take a real-world approach:

• Citibank offers consumers $150 to open a bank account (Perceived Reward = 80)
• Consumer must pay one bill per month for two months to get the money, and checking account fees are $6/month + is afraid that they will forget to close the account right away and rack up a couple more months of fees + assumes that they will rack up a couple of foreign bank ATM fees until they figure out where the Citibank ATMs are (Friction = 75)
• = 5% of consumers will open an account

(I have no idea what the actual adoption rates were for this campaign, but judging by the fact that this offer started at $50 and kept going up, I would guess 5% is, if anything, a generous estimate.)

Now, there’s obviously no science behind the 80 and 75 numbers - this still comes down to somewhat of an educated guess. But by thinking in terms of reward and friction, you can ask consumers more directed questions. You can ask on a scale of 1-10, how motivated consumers would be by $150. You can ask
on a scale of 1-10, how they would rate the effort of opening a new bank account. You can ask about satisfaction with their current bank. And you should always quietly add in a Friction of at least 20 to cover natural apathy.

The other reason this is useful is that you can try to move the bars. Let’s say you want to introduce some very slick AJAX functionality. You have to admit that your site is perfectly usable without it (low Perceived Reward). So you will need to make the Friction incredibly low in order to ensure a good level of adoption. Amazon did a great job of this with their inline 5-star rating UI.

Alternatively, you have a disruptive innovation that will require consumers to change their behavior (high Friction) - you’d better make it incredibly easy to see the value and ease the behavior transition. TiVo did this half-right - their original advertising did not communicate the value to me at all, but once I held that remote in my hand I was completely ready to buy the lifetime subscription and hand over my firstborn.

Tags: Design

Category: Psychology, ROI   Comment: Add A Comment
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