The phases of technology use

I’d like to make a sweeping generalisation about how people react to technology. Disregarding for the moment the variations and exceptions, I believe that people go through four phases.

Phase 1: What the heck do I do with it?

Phase 2: Wow! That’s amazing!

Phase 3: There’s this one little annoying thing...

Phase 4: I hate this thing.

The speed at which people move through the phases depends on many things, including how technology savvy the person is. My Granny would probably spend a lot longer in phase 1 for almost any product than I would. If a product has a well defined purpose, clear marketing and a good user interface, phase 1 might be kept extremely short. On the other hand, if the product’s purpose is unclear or the user interface difficult to navigate, people might get stuck on phase 1 and eventually give up.

Phase 2 is the ideal spot. How long phase 2 lasts is almost entirely dependent on product design. People in this stage are happily using the project and being pleased with the results. This could be that they’re having fun playing a new game, or it might be that their working is becoming for efficient, depending on the purpose of the product. If the product team has done their job right, people will be in the phase for months. If the team’s done exceptionally well, people might be here for a couple of years.

But nothing is perfect. No matter how well a product does its job, there will always be something it doesn’t do or some little quirk that starts to irritate you. The more you use the product, the more you notice the thing(s) that at first seemed insignificant. You’re now well into phase 3. You still use and like the product, but there’s something about it you wish you could change.

Eventually, the annoyance outweighs the usefulness and you slip into phase 4.

In an ideal product, phase 1 should be short enough to be unnoticeable. Phase 2 should last for years. Phase 3 should last even longer. If the product’s been well-designed, you shouldn’t reach phase 4 until the product is obsolete.

In my journey through using InfoPath 2007, phase 1 lasted about fifteen minutes. I opened up the program with no idea what it was, played around with it and quickly decided it was great. When I started looking into what could be done with conditional formatting and data connections, I was well into phase 2. By the time I realised the power of views, I was in love with the product!

I stayed there for several months but now I’m slipping into the early stages of phase 3. I still think InfoPath is fantastic and can be used in an incredibly powerful way to improve processes in many situations. It’s still my favourite Microsoft product (not that SharePoint and the Xbox don’t have their merits). But there are a few things just are starting to bug me. Like when I have to click “OK” five times to get back to the form after setting a filtered value as the default value for a field. Or when I want to set exactly the same conditional formatting rules for multiple fields and have to manually set the rules for each one.

But now I’ve seen 2010!

I’ve skipped straight past phase 1 and into phase 2. You’re going to be seeing quite a lot of excited posts from me about 2010 over the coming months.