5 Best Practices for getting the most from your DAP

In my role at EdCast, I have had the opportunity to help many large F500 enterprise deploy our Digital Adoption Platform (MyGuide) within their organization. As with many transformative technologies, new ways of thinking are required to assure success.

Any Digital Program, or Digital Transformation is best enabled by a Digital Adoption Platform, or DAP, but there's more to it than deploying some new software and hoping for the best. Digital Transformation programs succeed if, and when, accompanied by a well thought out Digital Adoption Strategy.

With that, here are my top 5 best practices for getting the most from your DAP.

1) Treat your DAP solution like the enabler of change that it is.

DAP makes any software easier to use, it helps drive adoption of features that are important to your business, it helps users come up to speed faster, and it improves productivity. To realize these benefits requires new ways of thinking, and using the proactive features at hand such as push notifications, auto-play guides, beacons, and tool tips. Use these features to highlight important changes or initiatives. Have a publication program in place; for example, enable a push notification for a week to highlight a software update and corresponding changes, and then use a beacon to call attention to an underutilized feature that will run for two weeks, and so on. Your guides should be an evolving experience, don't let them go old.

Most importantly, don't just build a bunch of guides to replace a library of PDFs and hope your users will come find them and consume them in traditional ways. That's not really taking advantage of DAP. If you find yourself trying to drive more people to your guides, you're probably using it as a passive content repository rather than an active Digital Adoption solution.

2) Weave in automation to further streamline workflows.

Inline guidance is the heart of DAP. often compared with GPS navigation, DAP helps users find their way by offering real time (turn by turn) guidance at each step of a workflow. Depending upon the context of the guide, a step may be chock full of information that is useful for a user really trying to learn and understand the application, or the step may be a quick "click here" to help a user in a rush simply complete a task quickly. Your DAP may also provide automation capabilities so that you can fully automate repetitive tasks.

But what about tasks that can't be fully automated, but require perfect accuracy or simply have a lot of known steps, but still require human interaction for a few steps? The solution is to build the guide to automatically run in automation mode, and pause and wait for the user to manually interact only where needed. This ultimately speeds up the task, reduces errors, and improves employee happiness - nobody likes performing redundant tedious work.

3) Be Agile and iterate.

Use the tools available to you such as surveys and analytics to continually improve your guides and understand what is working and what is not. Surveys can help you understand user sentiments, while analytics such as flow analysis and drop off charts can help you understand how users are actually interacting with guides, dropping off early, skipping steps, etc. App based analytics can also help you understand how users are using the underlying application to help you decide where you need to invest in creating new guides.

This best practice also suggests that it's not necessary to strive for perfection at your initial launch which allows you to optimize your time to ROI - get value from your investment faster. Your DAP solution should make it easy to iterate. MyGuide for example is very 'business friendly' and allows for fast and easy changes that any business person can do without the need to involve IT or professional services. If your DAP makes it hard to be agile, it becomes very hard to achieve success.

4) Explore the Toolbox.

Your DAP is a veritable tool box full of capabilities and features that can help you derive more ROI from your investment. Learn those tools and get creative. The core of any DAP is inline guides, but MyGuide for example also offers surveys, form validation, structuring text inputs in forms, image and video editing, and more. My CSM team shares a weekly feature infographic to help keep our customers informed and to supplement the array of training and support materials already available. We also maintain checklists so we can show our customers exactly what tools in the toolbox are already in use. Often eye opening conversation when an already happy customer realizes they've only scratched the surface of capabilities.

5) Embrace your inner artist.

Building guides is both a Skill and an Art. While MyGuide for example is a very easy tool to use and learn how to create guides fast, the complex enterprise software that you're building guides for is rarely so simple. Menu's change depending on users role, options change based on users department, managers have options that end users don't have, and icons sometimes change based upon state. Technical software professionals, especially those with programming experience, get it. They understand these nuances and can predict how the guide should react or quickly understand why it didn't work as expected, where Content professionals or non technical document writers may become frustrated by the lack of consistency.

On the other hand, it's important that guides be aesthetically pleasing, flow well and tell a story, satisfy the point of need, and generally follow established learning principles. It's also helpful to be a SME on the underlying platform. Choose your guide creators accordingly or work in teams to create awesome guides.

As with most disruptive technologies, DAP is new and people are constantly finding creative and amazing new ways to use these tools. I'm regularly WOW'd and humbled by the creativity and ingenuity of our customers.

So let's hear it, what are some of the creative ways you're using your DAP solution?