Rolling with the Rollout

Let’s not be subtle about it.

Digital product rollouts are often treated as an afterthought. That is the proper planning of internal and external socialization activities that would ensure the product persuades users of its benefits beforehand. “We’re building a very inviting and intuitive digital experience, that should be persuasive enough for any user…” or so the thinking goes. The problem with this approach is that it totally discounts that users often have a thousand other things on their mind. Just because we think our product is inherently persuasive  right out of the box, doesn’t make others see it that way. Most new things, no matter how intuitive, will present a cognitive challenge. And we can easily fool ourselves during usability testing because the “first encounter” challenge is simply sidestepped. Sure, test participants may tell us the app is easy to understand and use, because by the very nature of the testing environment we have effectively socialized them with the product. We have their attention. We are not really testing it “in the wild”, where distractions abound.

Many brilliant applications have failed because of poor rollouts. I have been recently exposed to the story of a fantastic customer facing application for the mortgage division of a national bank that tested beautifully, yet completely failed in the market. The bank pulled the plug on it and is now back to the drawing board. The reason, according to the parties involved I had a chance to meet with, was poor rollout. When the application was launched the organization failed to properly socialize it with key internal constituents. These constituents who had roles in the process the app was supposed to support did not know about the app. Or if they knew about it, they were poorly educated about its strategic objectives and features. Worse, many key interactions and resulting customer data never made it to their CRM system. What happened is as these people were not invited and persuaded to use the application, they were kept in the dark of many customer interactions they needed to know about. This was a recipe for disaster.

So what does this mean in concrete terms? I thought I’d put a simple practical outline together. The key idea is to care for the planning part of the rollout. A good rollout needs to be planned in advance. Not when the product is ready to “hit the shelves”. And it needs to provide each user base with clear and unequivocal answers to the following questions.

What is this application or tool for?

We need to explain to users in clear and simple terms what the product will do and most importantly how it will benefit them. And we need to hammer it in. Studies in persuasive psychology have shown that if we can identify the users pain points, remind them of those and prove that the product will alleviate them in succinct, clear and easy-to-understand terms, we are well on our way.

What am I supposed to do with it?

We want to illustrate in a bit more detail why the app will benefit users. This is the exercise of explaining the features that support the objective mentioned above. Simply put, demonstrate why it will benefit users if they use it as expected.

How does it work?

A picture is worth a thousand words. Videos that explain the features and show users what to expect have proven to be extremely effective in persuading users to try an app. Although, let’s be clear: We do need a good product to begin with. No amount of video illustration will help persuade customers to use a poorly designed, cluttered and confusing app.

How/Where do I get it?

This is about ensuring the app (or whatever it is) is easy to find, download and install. This seems like common sense but is also often ignored.

Rollout plans don’t have to be onerous and time consuming. In fact, the steps presented above can be planned for and executed during the development stages of the product with minimal effort using the same resources who actually produce the app. Then of course, someone in the organization needs to ensure all of that gets properly delivered to the target audience.