Why people might not want your product (even if it saves thousands of lives)

When Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 more than half of his crew of 160 died of scurvy. That ratio was not uncommon, and it’s reported that scurvy killed more sailors than warfare, accidents or anything else.

Imagine if you had a new innovation that could prevent scurvy. People would be begging you for the answer and you’d immediately become a hero wouldn’t you?

Lancaster's ship, Red Dragon

Over a hundred years later in 1601 an English sea captain called James Lancaster had a hypothesis that lemon juice would prevent scurvy.

Not only was his hypothesis correct, since we now know that scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, but he conducted an experiment which was pretty compelling. He gave sailors on one of his ships a ration of lemon juice, and not to the sailors on his other ships. Not a single sailor on the ship with a lemon ration got scurvy.

The sailors on the other three ships died in large and predictable numbers. He had to transfer sailors from the first ship to crew the others in order to continue the voyage.

You’d think the British Navy would immediately adopt, or at least trial, this new innovation that was simple and cheap, and pretty much 100% effective.

But it wasn’t until 1795, nearly two hundred years after Lancaster’s successful experiment, and three hundred after Vasco da Gama’s time, that the Navy finally prescribed citrus to all its sailors (the origin of the term limey for a Brit). It took even longer to reach the merchant marine.

It seems incomprehensible that a simple innovation that would wipe out scurvy and go on to save thousands of lives took so long to be adopted. You could argue that slower communication and dissemination of information hindered adoption. But by three hundred years?

It demonstrates that just having a good idea is not enough.

Dvorak keyboard

To take a slightly more recent example, you may have heard of the Dvorak keyboard. Even if you’ve heard of it, you probably don’t know anyone who uses one.

We know the story that the QWERTY keyboard was specifically designed to slow down typing so that adjacent mechanical arms of typewriters wouldn’t get jammed.

In fact, that’s not exactly true, as is clear by the fact that E and R are right next to each other and ‘er’ is a very common pair of letters to use in English. Nevertheless, those keyboards were designed with other mechanical constraints in mind. Those constraints are clearly long gone but the layout remains ubiquitous.

In many ways the Dvorak keyboard has distinct advantages over the QWERTY keyboard — specifically in terms of typing comfort and typing speed.

You could even turn your own computer’s keyboard into a Dvorak one right now (albeit with some stickers on your keys or an overlay).

Dvorak keyboard layout

Despite its objective strengths, almost no one uses a Dvorak keyboard.

It’s not the case that innovation in text input technology has been stagnant, but the current standard keyboard is so entrenched that many innovations have been built around its inherent weaknesses — predictive text, swiping text, etc.

Again, we see that what seems like a good idea doesn’t necessarily diffuse and get adopted rapidly, or at all.

Diffusion of Innovations

Those are two examples from the introduction of the book Diffusion of Innovations originally written in 1963 by Everett Rogers, an assistant professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University. It’s testament to the immutable principles of economics, human behaviour and psychology that his ideas are still so relevant today.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore published in 1991 is probably a more well-known book, and it builds upon the foundations that Rogers outlined over half a century ago.

Adoption

In Crossing the Chasm, Moore argues that there is a chasm between the early adopters of a product and the majority. If an innovation is to really succeed it must have appeal beyond the gadget fans, geeks and tinkerers.

Adoption curve

As an aside, you could argue that in the third decade of the 21st century, a globalised and more accessible market increases the absolute number of potential early adopters and a significant business can be built without needing to cross the chasm.

But if you look at it as more of a continuum, then there are necessary characteristics of an innovation that will drive a product along the innovation adoption life-cycle. These hold equally true when your innovation is making the leap beyond your immediate family, as to when it’s making the leap to a new continent.

In Rogers’s book, he distilled these characteristics down into five factors that affect the adoption of an innovation.

Rogers’ five factors

1. Relative advantage

2. Complexity

3. Compatibility

4. Trialability

5. Observability

These five factors are a great way to frame your strategic thinking around the adoption of your product or service. The key thing is, to a greater or lesser extent, they all need to be addressed. As we’ve seen in the historical examples above, focussing on one of them is not enough. And even addressing four out of the five may not be enough.

Relative advantage

Relative advantage is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes.

This is perhaps the most obvious one. People are unlikely to start using a new product if it isn’t better than what they use already. There are many dimensions to this though, so you need to think about why something new is better. Rogers also refers to perception in all of his five factors. Relative advantage doesn’t just mean better technical specs.

The word relative is important here. The advantage is not only relative to the incumbent solutions, but also to the specific group of users who are your target adopters.

Relative advantage however is necessary but not sufficient, and as with the cases of lime juice and the Dvorak keyboard, nailing just this one of the five factors doesn’t guarantee success.

Complexity

Complexity is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as relatively difficult to understand and use.

Also fairly obvious. If a new product is complex and difficult to use, it will reduce the level and rate of adoption. An example here is early personal computers where you had to get your head around computer programming to use them. Once a graphical user interface and a mouse were introduced, far more people felt that a computer was something they could make use of.

Introducing a graphical user interface

In contrast, mobile phones, although obviously very complex technologically, had fewer barriers due to perceived simplicity of use. The first mobile phones were operated much like the existing landline phone technology — buttons for 0–9 and a memory for storing a few most-used phone numbers. Crucially, the new technology was also compatible with the old system — a mobile phone could be used to call a landline and vica versa.

Simplicity and ease of use could be seen as relative advantages as above, but there’s also a risk that increased functionality in the pursuit of relative advantage can result in greater complexity. It’s up to the innovator to balance these opposing forces.

Relatively advantageous, or overly complex

Compatibility

Compatibility is the degree to which an innovation is perceived as consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters.

Rogers originally looked at compatibility of an innovation with reference to social and psychological factors. He gave the example of how even the naming of an innovation must be compatible with the intended users.

Trying to introduce a new a car called a Nova (as the apocryphal story about General Motors goes) is probably a bad idea for the Spanish-speaking market where no va means “no-go”.

One reason the Dvorak keyboard hasn’t gained acceptance is that it’s not compatible with people’s knowledge and experience of typing. The cognitive cost of learning to type again puts most people off.

For 21st century technological innovations I believe there’s a whole new side to how we can interpret compatibility. Compatibility has some very practical implications when it comes to the hardware and software of our modern daily lives. A lack of compatibility can be very frustrating when you can’t find the right type of charger for your phone, or you find out a computer game you want to play isn’t available for your particular games console. For me, this complexity of compatibility is a key reason why smart home products have failed to live up to their promise.

It’s a factor that has been exploited by companies such as Apple where they’ve built their own ecosystem of compatibility which makes things easier for their users, and has the added business benefit of putting up a barrier to adoption for competitors.

Trialability

Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.

This factor is particularly important for early adopters where investing their time and money into an untested new innovation may be seen as a risk. Later adopters are more likely to see peers using a new innovation, which can either offer a chance to vicariously trial something new, or enable a trial in a more practical sense such as borrowing a friends mobile phone to make a call.

To take that idea one step further, the internet enables potential adopters to go beyond their peers and see a new innovation in use as part of YouTube reviews and on other more specialist forums.

Trialability can be designed into a product. This is common in software products where a freemium pricing model is used and potential customers are initially given free access to a digital product to try it. The theory is that once that first barrier is lowered and users have tried the new product, they will see its value and be prepared to pay for it.

Getting users ‘hooked’ on your product is a whole subject in itself and excellently covered in Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal.

For some new innovations though, such as a new layout for a computer keyboard, the learning curve may be too steep, even if users are given ample opportunity to try it first.

Observability

Observability is the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others.

Something has to be seen before it can be adopted. Marketing can be part of this, but Rogers discusses more organic observation. An example might be people seeing new solar panels on a neighbour’s roof and later going on to install their own.

In some cases, like the watching of YouTube review videos mentioned above, observing something being used can act as a secondary trialability too.

Greater observability could be another reason why mobile phones were adopted faster than home computers. Not only were they naturally more likely to be observed in public, early users often saw them as status symbols and went to extra efforts to ensure they were being seen using their new mobile phones.

In general, hardware is often more observable than software. That, combined with the negligible marginal cost of shipping software to a new customer, are good reasons that software businesses often offer free trials for their products.

But as with the other factors, this is not enough on its own. As we’ve seen, the Dvorak keyboard is fairly well known. Not only that, it’s nearly always talked about in the context of its usability advantages. But almost no one uses one.

Build it and they will come

They won’t.

According to Rogers’ research, “most of the variance in the rate of adoption of innovation, from 49 to 87 percent, is explained by these five factors”.

So to maximise the chance of your innovation gaining adoption in the market, these should be addressed. Building what you think is a great, innovative product and expecting customers to make their way to you isn’t realistic.

Build your product with focus on a significant relative advantage compared to other products. Design to reduce complexity and increase compatibility. Increase trialability and observability. Perception is everything and everything is relative.

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If you have an idea you’re thinking about bringing to market, or if there’s anything else you’d like me to cover in this blog feel free to get in touch.