Why People Adopt Or Wait For New Technology

(this ad for the new Samsung phone is making fun of the typical Apple early adopters…)

Jared Spool, consultant with UIE, posted a nice article on why people adopt or wait for new technology. He identified the following categories for the different behaviors:

• People Who Are First
  • Being First to Gain Social Status
  • Being First as Product Research (That’s me and my colleagues at IxDS…)
  • Being First to Solve An Active Need (according to Spool, these are the folks to design for)
• People Who Wait
  • Waiting Because Unaware of Latent Needs
  • Waiting Because Of Perceived Cost Of Change
  • Waiting Out The Product Lifetime

I like this model, even though some of the points are larger than the others and might therefore need a further categorization, as e.g. “Cost of Change”, where Spool already mentioned that the cost of change comes in many forms…

Furthermore it would be interesting to see how these groups are distributed for certain kind of new technologies.

And it would also be good to discuss which strategies are around to address the various groups.

(via Andrea Bauer)

About these ads