Written by Andrea Folino and Natalia Kawana

Digital Adoption Solutions or Platforms (DAS or DAP) are a rather new category of software solutions. In a few words, they are tools to create a guidance overlay over virtually any web-based software.

With DAS, HR trainers, business process owners and other professionals can translate manuals, trainings and support resources into real-time, in-app guidance tutorials, which will follow end users through easy and complex processes alike. Moreover, tutorials can be combined with other components: tooltips and interactive quizzes, for instance, in order to create a powerful and interactive guidance overlay.

This overlay can help companies and users in many scenarios. Among them, in the processes of onboarding and training, making users more independent and self reliable when using software. The overlay is available when and where they need it, and enables them to perform tasks even if they are not very proficient on the target system.

It sounds very promising so far. But all that glitters is not gold. DAS/DAPs also have some shortcomings, just like anything. In this article, we’ll try to openly and honestly discuss their most notable shortcomings and if/how we can address them.

All that glitters is not gold 😉

Young technology

Digital Adoption Platforms or Solutions (DAP or DAS) are relatively young software categories. Many people have never even heard of them, so they don’t know what they are all about and what benefits they may bring. If one doesn’t know the basics about them, it’s also likely that they don’t know how to successfully implement them. Think about it: if you don’t know that something exists, you can’t even conceive it as a possibility for the issues you are facing. You lack that very concept.

It’s true, DAS/ DAPs solve many issues of training employees, onboarding and turning software into friendlier resources, but we still need more use cases and more experience over time in order to establish them as consolidated software categories. We need to educate trainers, companies and software users about the usefulness and value of this kind of solution, and to establish trust on it. We need to spread the word and get the message across, so that people who are facing the issues we can address know about DAS.

Digital adoption constant support

This point derives from the core of digital adoption: change. This means a DAS/ DAP has to follow the structure and the logic of the platform it is integrated with. As a consequence, overlays need to be reviewed when the target platform undergoes any changes. At least to make sure that they still work smoothly.

Unfortunately, because of a DAP is naturally and strictly connected to a changing environment like software, there is not yet a way to avoid at least some sort of period review of the overlays created. At Newired, we invest a lot of time and energy to make our solution robust and adaptable to changes in the target system, and at every release, we offer you a better product.

It also needs onboarding

Even if a DAP is simple and intuitive, it is still a software and, as a software, it needs to be learnt.

This is a contradiction with the philosophy behind a DAP, which is a system created to teach people how to use other programs.

Unfortunately, this step cannot be skipped yet, at least until most people are acquainted with DAS/DAP. What can be done is to make this process as simple and intuitive as possible (aka user friendly). By for example, by turning the platform into something self-explanatory, very easy to use. This is what we aim to do at every release at Newired, so we constantly improve our solution and deliver ever more robust and intuitive products.

Trusting a third-party product

Companies that work with sensitive data or just have strict rules could be unfavorable to installing external software (DAP, in our case), as their overlay data would typically be hosted at the vendor’s public cloud.

The trust issue could be solved by applying a kind of installation which fits the customer’s requirements, for example, an on-premise installation at the customer’s. With this kind of installation, the DAS/ DAP platform is installed on the company’s private server, so that the DAS/ DAP vendor cannot access the data input in it in any way.

At Newired, we address this by offering customers different hosting possibilities, so that their most essential needs can be met. We have become a reference in on-premise installations, but we can still host the data for you if this is what you prefer. Learn more here.

Conclusions

As DAS/ DAPs are growing and becoming ever more present as a software category, it’s very important to know not only their benefits, but also their limitations. Knowing these solutions under all these aspects is the best way to make an informed decision when implementing them.

At Newired, we are also consumers and we want to be very honest about what we can and cannot do. We have gone through the shortcomings with our kind of solution, and now a final message remains: even though we cannot address all of a company’s issues with digital adoption, we can still be a very powerful ally in an era of digital transformation.

We’ll be very happy to learn how we can help you.

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