Adoption-Barrier Interview¶
Method — instantiates Cultural Friction Mediation Design
Reads resistance, workarounds, and quiet non-use as evidence of a norm mismatch to be located — not as irrationality to be trained away.
The Adoption-Barrier Interview starts from a behaviour that has already happened — someone ignored the tool, built a workaround, or quietly stopped using it — and interviews to find out why, on the working assumption that the behaviour is intelligent. Its defining premise is that non-use is information about a norm collision, not a symptom of ignorance: the question is never "how do we get them to comply?" but "what were you protecting when you routed around this?" That reframing is the whole mechanism. Where the Emic Context Interview maps norms before launch, this one works backward from observed friction after it, turning dismissed "resistance" into a located clash the design can act on.
Example¶
A district mandates a learning-analytics dashboard that flags students as at-risk; six weeks in, most teachers have logged in once and never returned. The reflex reading is "teacher resistance — they need more training." Adoption-Barrier Interviews, anchored on the actual non-use, tell a different story: the dashboard's per-teacher flag rates are visible to administrators, and teachers experience it as surveillance that overrides their own professional read of a student — a direct hit on an autonomy-and-trust norm. What looked like laziness is deliberate professional self-protection. The interviews produce a characterized friction signal (log-in-then-abandon, driven by a surveillance reading) and a set of candidate clash points on the incompatibility surface (visibility of individual flags; who the tool reports to), which the mediation can address instead of scheduling another training.
How it works¶
The distinguishing move is to begin from a concrete behaviour, not an attitude survey. The interviewer names the specific workaround or non-use and asks the person to reconstruct it step by step, then presses on the reason — separating a genuine capability gap ("I couldn't find the button") from a norm conflict ("I could, but using it would expose my students to judgement I don't trust"). Throughout, it resists the default attribution that non-users are simply irrational, treating that reflex as the thing most likely to hide the real friction.
Tuning parameters¶
- Sampling stance — resisters, abandoners, and enthusiastic adopters each reveal something different; who you weight changes what surfaces.
- Behaviour anchor — start from a named workaround versus a general "how's it going." Anchoring on real behaviour cuts through socially-desirable answers.
- Attribution discipline — how hard the protocol pushes interviewers to resist "they just need training" as the explanation of first resort.
- Capability-vs-norm sort — how sharply each barrier is classified as a skill gap or a norm conflict, since the two lead to opposite repairs.
- Safety of disclosure — whether people can admit non-use without fear, which governs whether you hear the truth at all.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is converting friction that sponsors write off as noise into a specific, addressable signal — from real behaviour, which is harder to fake than a survey. Its failure modes: it can mistake an idiosyncratic personal gripe for a shared norm conflict, and self-reported reasons are subject to after-the-fact rationalization. The classic misuse is to run it to prove the artifact is fine and the users deficient — gathering quotes to justify a training budget rather than a redesign. This is the fundamental attribution error operating as policy: reading non-use as a fixed trait of the user instead of a product of the situation.[n1] The discipline that guards against it is corroborating what people say against what they do, and letting a genuine norm conflict trigger a design change rather than another compliance push.
How it implements the components¶
adoption_friction_signal— surfaces and characterizes the resistance, workaround, or non-use as a legible signal, with its likely normative cause attached.incompatibility_surface_map— locates, from lived experience, the specific points where the artifact collides with local norms, populating the surface with real clash points.
It does not reconstruct the host norm system from the inside before launch — that is Emic Context Interview's job — nor test legitimacy and trust against explicit criteria, which is the Trust and Legitimacy Checklist's.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Cultural Friction Mediation Design — supplies the after-launch friction reading that tells the design what actually collided.
- Consumes: Emic Context Interview — the norm map that lets observed friction be read as a mismatch rather than a mood.
- Sibling mechanisms: Emic Context Interview · Workaround Observation Walkthrough · Norm-Conflict Matrix · Cultural Fit Workshop
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Communication, Facilitation & Learning
Rationale: The mechanism reads resistance, workarounds, and quiet non-use as evidence of a norm mismatch to be located — not as irrationality to be trained away, so its operative form is communication, facilitation, or learning exposure.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Adoption-Barrier Interview as 'Reads resistance, workarounds, and quiet non-use as evidence of a norm mismatch to be located — not as irrationality to be trained away', so its operative form is Communication, Facilitation & Learning.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; high confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Ethnography & Qualitative Methods
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Interpreting resistance and workaround behavior through open inquiry into what participants are protecting is an emic qualitative-interview practice.
Related originating lineages:
- Human-Computer Interaction — Contextual inquiry into why users route around a tool contributes the product-research application.
- Organizational & Management Science — Change adoption and implementation resistance provide the organizational setting.
- Psychology — Attribution research, especially the fundamental attribution error, motivates looking for situational constraint and norm collision instead of labeling a person resistant.
- Sociology & Anthropology — Norm collision and culturally rational non-use supply the social interpretation.
Review resolution: Reconstructing a concrete workaround or non-use episode from the participant's own frame is primarily an ethnographic qualitative method. HCI, organizational change, psychology, and sociology materially shape the adoption diagnosis, supporting cross-disciplinary origin without a claim of encyclopedia invention.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
Two siblings sit close to this one and are worth separating. Workaround Observation Walkthrough watches people work and infers friction from what they do; the Adoption-Barrier Interview asks, and so reaches stated reasons the walkthrough can only guess at — the two corroborate each other. And the Norm-Conflict Matrix takes the scattered clash points this interview surfaces and organizes them into a systematic map: the interview supplies the lived evidence, the matrix formalizes it.
[n1] The fundamental attribution error — the tendency to explain others' behaviour by disposition ("they're resistant") while discounting the situation ("the tool violates a norm they hold"). Named in social psychology by Lee Ross. Treating non-use as a user trait rather than a situational signal is this error operating as policy. ↩