What is the product adoption curve?
The product adoption curve is a model of how a new product spreads through a market over time, from innovators and early adopters to the early majority, late majority and laggards. It comes from Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory and is drawn as a bell curve.
What are the five groups on the adoption curve?
The adoption curve sorts people into five groups by how soon they take up something new. Everett Rogers set it out in Diffusion of Innovations, and it applies to products, features and ideas alike.
| Group | Who they are | What they need |
|---|---|---|
| Innovators | A small fringe who try anything new | Access, and the chance to tinker |
| Early adopters | Visionaries who see an advantage in going first | A clear edge over the old way |
| Early majority | Pragmatists who wait for proof | References, a complete product, low risk |
| Late majority | Skeptics who adopt once it is the norm | Simplicity, and little to learn |
| Laggards | People who change only when they must | No alternative left |
The two majorities are the big middle of the curve and hold most of the market. Innovators and laggards are the thin tails.
Plotted as a running total instead, the same groups form an S-curve: slow at first, steep through the two majorities, flat at the end.
What is the chasm?
The chasm is the gap between early adopters and the early majority. Geoffrey Moore described it in Crossing the Chasm: the two groups want different things, so winning the first does not win the second.
Early adopters will put up with rough edges to get ahead. The early majority wants a whole, proven product, and asks peers who already use it. A B2B tool can sell well to a few enthusiastic teams and then stall, because nothing in its references, onboarding or support speaks to the pragmatist.
What is an adoption cycle?
The term is used two ways. It can mean the technology adoption life cycle, which is the curve above under another name. It can also mean the path a single person or account takes from first hearing about a product to making it routine, which Rogers called the innovation-decision process: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation.
The curve describes a market. The cycle describes one buyer moving through it. Most products lose people at implementation, when the decision is made but the work of setting up and changing habits begins.
How do you move users along the curve inside the product?
Every new feature has its own small adoption curve inside your user base. Power users find it the week it ships. Most of the base waits, and a large share never finds it.
Treat the later groups as a design brief. They will not explore menus or read release notes. They need the task done with as little learning as possible. Track which cohorts pick up a feature and how fast, then remove the steps that hold the rest back.
Foldspace includes product analytics (funnels, retention and session replay) to show which cohorts are adopting, and its Product Agent serves the later groups directly: they ask for the task, and it gets done in the product without them learning the menus.