Sticky Downward: The Freakonomics of Innovation & Adoption
Our current Apple-besotted climate has focused many conversations on the critical, almost singular, importance of innovation in the success of an offering. My recent and regular struggles with Office/iWork, iPhoto/Aperture, Entourage/Outlook, skitch, and brightkite are making me think that we’ve fetishized innovation to the point that we’re overlooking more powerful dynamics that drive the adoption of new technologies or switching from one product to another.
EverydayUX has a post about how much web2.0 we can handle, which highlights a couple of adoption dynamics:
The biggest challenge is not only finding the ones that work best for you (or quickly recognizing the ones that don’t) but also trying to predict the ones that are going to be around for the long haul and stand the best chance of getting some uptake with your friends that might not roll in the same techno-circles as the Scobles and Winers of the world.
As I keep adding services to my day-to-day life, the challenge of integrating new ones becomes greater as they invariably begin to overlap (see dodgeball and brightkite).
Here, Alex highlights some key points: will the product you’re considering be around; does the slight, even subtle difference between two products with overlapping features warrant a move?
I think there’s an interesting freako- micro- economic dynamic worth looking at here — in grad school, I learned it as “sticky downward.”
Mainstream economists love their maths (I love saying that) and they love smooth curves in graphs. Smooth curves mean smooth tranfers into and out of self-equilibrating markets, the holy grail of economic policy. Neo-classical economists like to kink those curves by reminding us that people aren’t perfectly rational price-seekers, and that many other dynamics drive even the simplest market choices.
In labor economics, a great deal of time has been spent arguing that smooth downward sloping labor demand curves are inaccurate. In grad school, I had to learn multiple arguments against this shape, BUT the interesting one here is the argument that labor demand curves are “sticky downward”. Take a look at the typical supply and demand curves (and ignore D2, that’s not relevant to this argument).
D1 implies that as the price of labor (P) goes down, the quantity demanded (Q) goes up. Conversely, as the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. The smooth, continuity of the curve implies that, in large markets, even the smallest shift in the price of labor will cause people to be hired or fired.
But companies don’t work that way, they are responsive to price in very lurchy, semi-rational fashions. Many factors contribute to a ’stickiness’ that keeps people from being fired even as the cost of keeping them on increases: managers become socially connected to employees; there are significant but hard to measure replacements costs; it’s just a hassle to can this person; no one wants to do the deed; you already have overhead; morale for the rest of the team etc. So, yes the increase in the price of labor creates a downard pressure on demand, but there’s a stickiness with labor that you don’t have with impersonal commodities like loaves of bread, widgets, screws, etc.
So what? There’s a sticky downward dynamic for adoption of high-consideration, comlex products. While I am sick of talking about Apple, my experience with the iPod highlights the sticky downward adoption dynamic. I owned four MP3 players before finally buying an iPod. The hours I had spent ripping my CDs and labelling the tracks (80% of my music is classical or jazz, the worst parts of CD database information), were a massive stickiness factor. All my stuff was here, and I would have to move it there . . . is the iPod really that cool, the wheel really that nifty, the thing really that much better? In the end, I moved because iTunes seemed to have hit critical mass in its catalog and I tested a bunch of my classical CDs on a friends’ iTunes installation and saw that their CD database was much cleaner (and easier to clean) than any others. To drift into an innovation conversation for a moment, this does highlight Bill Buxton’s point that the success of the iPod goes waaaaay beyond our adulation of Steve Jobs and Sir Jonathan . . . it’s also the lawyers who negotiated the contracts for the music and the wonks who cleaned up the messy German names of composers and pieces, the complicated Kochel and Opus groupings, and the inconsistent movement notation, the people who made the data transfer faster, etc.
The point, though (I dream of the time when I can go a day and not talk about Apple or the iPod) is that the switch was very sticky . . . it took months to decide, and then weeks to actualy complete that switch, and it was a sticky, messy switch to make.
As always, the point must be made that this isn’t new. We’ve been aware of switch dynamics for years (and those of us in marketing and advertising are used to briefs that highlight whether this is a switch or join message). But there are a few notions embedded in stickiness that make it useful for designers and design thinking people:
- sticky implies a tugging, ripping away process. It acknowledges the pains of those switches
- sticky gets us out of rational actor thinking and acknowledges the long, multi-centered process of decision-making
- sticky elevates the conversation back up to perceived value of the overall product experience rather than a mapping of individual features to something’s success
- sticky is a user-centered phrase, where innovation isn’t. To say that something succeeded because it was innovative isn’t nearly as informative, rich, or empathy-inducing as understanding how stickiness was overcome
So, after a decidedly mixed launch, the XO will finally be tested by the audience and in the kind of environment it was designed for. (As opposed to bloggers and podcasters who have iPods, iPhones, XBoxes, two laptops and power towers.)
kip/bot/blog