Barriers to Adoption
Naming barriers to adoption means listing the specific reasons real people won't switch to your new idea, product or process, so effort goes into removing the actual blocker instead of pushing harder on features nobody was blocked by.
Five steps run in sequence, from talking to the people who haven't adopted through to retesting once the fix lands.
Reach for this when…
- Adoption has stalled and the team's answer is 'market it harder,' with no diagnosis of why people are holding back.
- A rollout that tested well in a pilot is stalling at wider launch.
- Different stakeholders blame different things (price, habit, trust) and nobody has actually asked users.
How to run it
- Talk to people who haven't adopted, not just the ones who did.
- Sort what you hear into real categories: cost, complexity, trust, habit, access.
- Rank barriers by how many people they block and how hard they are to remove.
- Design one intervention per top barrier, not one campaign for all of them.
- Retest adoption after each intervention before moving to the next barrier.
A worked example
Situation. Chanda Mwansa built ZedPay, a digital payments app in Lusaka, Zambia, aimed at smallholder farmers who were signing up but not actually transacting.
Applied. She interviewed non-users at a market cooperative and sorted the barriers. It wasn't trust in the app: farmers' buyers still insisted on cash, so digital payment created a reconciliation problem for the farmer, not a convenience.
Result. ZedPay built a cash-out feature at the buyer's collection point, removing that specific barrier, and transaction volume in that region tripled over the next two months.
The catch
It's easy to collect barriers that are really symptoms of a deeper trust problem, and treating each symptom separately wastes effort without ever reaching the root cause. People are also unreliable narrators of their own resistance - what they say blocks them and what actually blocks them often differ.
If the loudest barrier and the biggest barrier aren't the same thing, fix the biggest one first.