Software Userization: Putting Users First & Technology Second

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Technology empowers people with the tools to work more efficiently, be more productive, and do their job better.?

However, as we operate in the new normal that is the digital workplace, software users are overwhelmed with countless applications with fractured interfaces and complex learning curves.

According to a recent study of 10,000+ global employees from Asana, the average employee uses 13 different applications 30 times daily.

While technology is scaling, software itself has become standardized. It’s built for the masses.?

Generic software experiences directly impact UX and time-to-value for users, leading to poor end-user adoption, organizations failing to find ROI in their technology investments, and high churn levels.

At Whatfix, we’re on a mission to create a world where individuals are empowered to freely use and experience the benefits of the technology they utilize daily. We’re doing this through a concept called userization.

What is Userization?

Userization is building integrated, adaptable technology that enables software users by putting them in the driver’s seat.

Userisation has three main pillars:

• Userization makes it easy for users to take action, collaborate, and complete tasks faster.
• Userization is contextual. Every action is taken where the user is.
• Userization brings the technology to users and nudges them to change behavior

Userization unlocks a user’s full potential across their entire stack of software applications. Through personalized, integrated, and inclusive technology experiences. This creates a net positive impact and experience for each software users’ understanding, productivity, and success with particular users on particular technologies.

In short, userization is building an integrated, personalized experience that works for software users and empowers them. It allows for easier collaboration and taking action, leads to faster task completion and behavioral change, and drives efficiency and productivity.

Software products are standardized. Users are anything but. Software users frequently struggle to learn the functionalities, find support when they need and collaborate easily across different applications. This translate into increasing support costs, lower productivity, and higher time-to-value from software.

Software is powerful, but without full adoption and understanding of how to use these solutions, software users will never realize its total value and will fail to reach their potential.

3 Pillars of Userization

The basis of userization is to create technology solutions and software that work for individual uses. It empowers each end-user - regardless of background, experiences, technology upbringing, role, and so forth - to get the most out of the software they use daily and to reach their performance potential.

The three core pillars that userization aims to achieve are:

1. Outcome and role-based technology experiences

Modern SaaS tools have multiple use cases for various customer personas and industries. For example, Whatfix can be used by:

• Product teams create in-app guidance, drive product adoption, track product analytics, and collect user feedback
• L&D teams for digital onboarding, training and development, performance support, and internal announcements
• IT teams to facilitate change, onboard users to new software implementations, and drive overall software adoption
• Customer support teams to provide better customer onboarding experience, reduce product confusion and time-to-value, provide self-help support, and gather feedback

With diverse user cases, it’s critical to have contextual, role-based experiences for each user cohort. Contextual onboarding, training, support, collaboration, and other product experiences segmented by persona make it simpler to use language your audience is familiar with, highlight the most critical features and flowers for each user type, and showcase a software’s full potential.

With userization, software applications can create user cohorts and build contextual product experiences for each segment. This approach provides a user-centric software experience that can be scaled across a large user base, ultimately empowering every software user and driving overall technology adoption.

2. Integrated technology experiences

Modern professionals are bombarded with new software tools, and each software platform has a different interface and approach to learning, sharing, collaboration, and support.?

This leads to fractured software experiences, with each solution needing to educate its customers on its product’s jargon, interface, flows, and overall product experience.

Userization aims to bring software interfaces and experiences together into one unified experience. Connecting experiences together provides a foundation for software users to feel comfortable inside a technology solution.?

It breaks down the barriers to software adoption, as users have experience with similar software experiences. It reduces overall time-to-value during the onboarding stage, as users are already familiar with its in-app guidance and onboarding flows they encounter in other digital processes and applications.

3. Inclusive technology experiences

Technology companies are often unintentionally gatekeepers of their solutions by using industry-specific jargon and creating software experiences with steep learning curves. Userization breaks down technology adoption barriers by making software more inclusive of all users, regardless of technology upbringing, professional experience, role, or industry.

With experiences that are more approachable and human, software users can better engage and interact with the applications they use - ultimately empowering them to use software to their advantage, maximize their output, and reach their full potential.?

Download our whitepaper on software userization to read about the benefits of software userization and explore unique case studies that may apply to your industry.