Solving the Challenge of Unused Software
How custom application training can help increase user adoption of unused software within your organization.
It’s an all too frequent tale. You invest in great software to drive progress and innovation within your business. But fast forward to a few months later, and you’re faced with lack of user adoption within your organization.
The product is up and running. You may have even invested in training for your technical users, to make sure they got the knowledge they needed to keep their system up and running and to build out their analytic applications. But what about the employees who were to be the actual users of these applications? They have been forgotten.
It’s one of the most common ‘mistakes’ I see. It’s not human nature for most people to simply change course and adopt a new way of doing things. They need to see what is in it for them, and how it will make their jobs easier or more effective. So, how do you make sure that the users of the applications embrace change? The best way is to provide the user with application specific training. This type of training does not focus on the product, but how to use the application that is powered by the product. That’s because these users do not need to learn features and functions in a generic way. They need to learn exactly what they need to do with the application when it becomes part of their standard toolbox.
As you consider this type of training for your users, also be sure to consider the following strategies to maximize its success.
The first step is to identify the use cases
What problems or use cases exist that you need to solve? When deploying an application, it’s important to enable and educate the users on specific use cases they are trying to solve with the application. The enablement should not be focused on the product’s features and functions, but rather specific steps and processes followed for the given use case. In other words, it is more training on the use case than it is on the product.
Be careful with the data you choose
When building your enablement, you want to be careful with the data you use in your application. Using sample data may not highlight the right things you are trying to show, or it may cause your user to pay more attention to the data rather than the workflow. When your business users are learning, the focus needs to be on the specific workflow and not the data.
Make sure the training is not just a demo
A demo is useful to get people excited about the new solution and how it will help them do their job. But it typically just shows the happy path, highlighting things in the best possible light. Your users will be given the ability to navigate the application as they wish, so they require more than just a demo. The goal should be to allow users to learn how to drive the application and become familiar with all of it, not just the specific demo path.
Help increase user adoption within your organization with Custom Application Trainingfrom Qlik Education. It shows your team how easy it is to use Qlik to make better business decisions. Custom videos designed specifically on your application will show your team what they might see in their own day-to-day work which will better promote adoption. As they make Qlik part of a regular decision-making process, your team will innovate and help your business stay competitive in the market.