This article was written for people familiar with the theories shared with us through the Diffusion of Innovation study. Yeah, I'm a nerd. I read studies. Link here. All this stuff should be fairly natural to click into and understand though? Let me know if that's the case in the comments.
Like with time travel, if you disrupt the timeline, bad things happen.
The fun thing is (if you're a sadist), you can kind of accomplish the same thing by shortcutting the natural process of adoption of a new innovation. Why? 👇
People are segmented into different categories specific to when they naturally adopt something new for a reason. Their mindset controls their -> thoughts -> feelings -> actions, and when you introduce someone to something earlier than they'd naturally pick it up...
Their mindset starts creating risk for them. Later adopters value safety, certainty, and much more done-for-you everything taken care of, bullet proof type stuff. Thus, for multiple reasons, they do not gain the technical knowledge they'd need to live in an innovative environment
Where this becomes a problem is when things start going bad. Imagine a zombie apocalypse breaks out and you haven't bothered to learn how to walk yet. Bad? Very. Even worse than that analogy. In the innovative landscape, things go bad much more often.
There is exponentially less safety relative to innovations that have been commercialized and released to the masses. And so sure, shortcut the natural adoption process for other people if you'd like, but understand that in the innovative space, things are:
- Much more complicated
- Ruthless via there being many less safety barriers keeping you from total ruin
- And requires a certain level of technical knowledge to operate within.
And the mindsets of those people who are later adopters generally prefer a:
- Hands off, done for you / turn-key approach
- Don't really want to dive in and learn about the technicals
- And are used to things being easy / get frustrated when things aren't simple.
These people are not wired to operate in an early adopter space. If you shortcut the natural process of adoption and slingshot them to the front of the line, get them onboarded and etc, they:
- Won't want to learn how to do things / will want others to do it for them
- Will possibly try learning it but quickly realize it's too complicated and stop
- And thus not have the technical knowledge to operate in the space, rendering them... Not being able to move
And then when something bad happens, their hands are tied, and they are simply forced to go with the flow thanks to their own mindset keeping them from learning the required fundamentals to operate within the innovative / earlier adopter environment.
So time travel if you'd like, but just know you risk disrupting the timeline and really messing things up for people.
Disrupt the natural process of adoption, and you risk putting people in helpless situations.
Unless you want to increase the risk of hurting people, don't make the UI of brand-new innovations look like the UI familiar to the older folk in our lives just to attract more people, for example.
The natural course of adoption has to be followed. Iterations to the innovation and education from peers earlier on in the adoption curve via time passing has to happen first. Why?
Because this all makes the product safe enough for the later adopters to be able to use it safely, and for them to have the knowledge required to know how to use them properly.
