A question on Liddle’s three stages of technology adoption
I have been reading the book Designing Interactions and particularly liked David Liddle’s simple approach to categorizing the progression of technology development.
He suggests there are 3 stages to technology adoption:
1. Enthusiast Stage:
A small group of users adopt a technology because they love and appreciate technology in an aesthetic way. The fact that the technology may be a bit difficult to use is attractive and fun to enthusiasts. They are most interested in exploiting capabilities with little regard for actual productivity gains or lifestyle motivations.
2. Business Stage:
Once enough enthusiasts are using it, one of them figures out how to do something with it in their work to add productivity. It is in this stage that the technology’s interface are somewhat stabilized and some uniformity emerges. The technology may still require special training but the productivity gains are worth the burden.
3. Consumer Stage:
With the technology now in a growing number of hands for business use, the technology now begins to reach a price point that is affordable for the masses (or those picking up the tab for the masses, in the case of marketers). It is in this phase that the important controls become automatic and the learning curve is fast. The style and the technology’s affect on lifestyle are the key motivations at this stage.
I liked this breakdown as I think it provides an interesting way to look at the current state of the virtual worlds industry. Of the technologies I’m aware of currently available and in development, there seems to be solutions at every one of these stages.
What do you think? How would you classify our industry when mapped to Liddle’s stages?
You can watch an excerpt of the interview David provided for the book here.
July 24th, 2008 16:04
I would say that the virtual worlds industry doesn’t particularly follow this progression, as I think some technologies don’t. The only successful genre of virtual worlds is in the third category - kids’ entertainment. So I would say VWs went from 1 to 3 and then will get to 2.
I think that this can happen with some internet or Web tools for a variety of reasons - their first valuable form only has the capability to fulfill a mass market need in the consumer space and has to get more sophisticated before being appropriate for the enterprise space; or cultural barriers are higher in some cases within the workplace; or security concerns are too high initially within the enterprise. With virtual worlds I think it has been primarily the first reason.
July 24th, 2008 18:51
I agree the industry as a whole has not followed this progression but I think the individual families of virtual world technologies can be mapped to these stages. Then the question as you point out becomes, did they follow a linear path or are they jumping around. Maybe Liddle should revise this to be more about classification rather than a linear progression.
The underlying technology of the kids entertainment variety do have more characteristics in common with games than virtual worlds so they may be an exception.
July 27th, 2008 18:12
See I think when you add MUDa/MUSHs/MOOs into the equation there a bit more a development along those stages. In reality, MUDs were really the stage 1 since they were very hobbyish, required time and only had a few players who were insanely devoted to the point of developing these worlds themselves. However, most of them began to become rather systematic in their outlook and took on a D&D style rule set.
This really made for a transition into stage 2 which was further stabilized by the rise of UO and the first MMOs. That plan was then followed through to the transition into phase 3 where I think the game based VWs are now.
However I think the non-game based ones are in either of two positions. They stymied at the transition to stage 2 since really how to you systematize a whole world in a uniform way and haven’t moved forward in 20 years or so (except for adding pictures really they’re similar to the older MOOs) or the modern VWs have no connection to the non-game MUDs of the past and instead are a throw back to the beginning of stage 2 when the MMOs moved into the transition between 2 and 3. MMOs showed there could be a business model but the concept of VW is so different from the game based MMOs that they really need to go through 2 again.
Please excuse any typos or gross logic flaws I’m still a little jet-lagged