Executing a digital adoption strategy
Use Nexthink Adopt and the Infinity platform to maximize digital transformation impact.
Problem
Despite significant investments in digital tools, many transformation initiatives underdeliver because employees are not onboarded and supported to adopt new technologies effectively.
Even more critically, many organizations lack a clear strategy for determining whether applications meet employee needs or how to measure their success.
Solution
With the full integration of Nexthink Adopt into the Infinity platform, you have a unique opportunity to combine in-app guidance with real-time employee experience insights—helping your organization drive software usage, improve employee satisfaction, reduce app-related tickets, and increase productivity.
This document outlines the phases of a successful digital adoption strategy—discover, plan, design, deploy, measure, optimize and balance adoption success—including instructions for using Nexthink Infinity features such as DEX scores, Campaigns, and Applications to support each phase.
Launching a successful digital adoption solution
Follow these steps to obtain approval within your organization and run a digital adoption solution:
Executing a digital adoption solution requires Nexthink Infinity—at least the Workplace Experience baseline product—and Nexthink Adopt.
Step 1 - Discovering gaps and prioritizing use cases
Before launching your digital adoption solution, it is essential to determine the needs and gaps within your organization.
This discovery approach helps isolate meaningful opportunities—ones that reduce support burden and directly improve employee productivity. Follow these steps:
Rely on Nexthink Infinity insights to determine where digital adoption can be more impactful.
Review DEX Scores across departments or personas to detect areas of friction.
Configure a target application in Nexthink for monitoring. This way, you can identify:
Low adoption/usage of licensed features or applications.
Navigation struggles due to poor UI or unfamiliar processes.
Issues affecting in-app performance.
Launch campaigns to survey your employees—with mixed levels of tenure and experience—to collect direct feedback on confusing tools, tasks and/or recent changes in the target web application.
In addition, conduct interviews and/or shadow employees to recognize their struggles while conducting in-app tasks.
Possible campaign and interview questions:
Opinion-scale questions: How satisfied have you been with Application X the past 3 months?
What issues have you run into with Application X in the past 3 months? complexity, slowness, problems with procedures, access, errors.
Which parts/features of Application X would like us to improve?
Single-answer questions: Do you need additional training or documentation for any of your digital tools?
Net Promoter Score questions: How likely is it that you would recommend Application X to a colleague?
Whenever possible, mine experience data directly from the target web application to determine critical processes with high failure or drop-off rates.
Cross-reference all collected information to list and prioritize use cases subject to a digital adoption solution.
Once you have mapped the in-app use cases relevant to the digital solution, you can proceed to draft an internal proposal.
Step 2 - Planning your digital adoption strategy and securing internal buy-in
To secure leadership support and position your digital adoption initiative as a strategic enabler, create an internal data-backed proposal that involves stakeholders from the outset.
Use collected insights in the discovery stage to convey the urgency and business value of starting this adoption initiative. The goal of this proposal is to align your organizational needs and expected outcomes with DAP content and project success evaluation—all within an estimated timeframe.
Here is a sample pitch structure you can adapt:
Needs assessment & analysis
Employees struggle with onboarding into the new HRIS tool.
DEX scores for the HRIS app are 67 (-10 below benchmark), with low task completion and multiple feedback complaints.
IT support sees a 28% ticket spike after each update.
Prioritized use cases
New employee onboarding in HRIS
Expense claim process in ERP
MFA setup in collaboration tools
DAP solution: output content
HRIS onboarding flow for 200 employees in preselected regions. This includes 4–5 targeted Adopt walkthrough guides (tooltips are TBD).
Metrics to track
Adoption dashboards: guide engagement and completion rates.
Configured alerts triggered by broken guides.
DEX scores.
Campaign response trends.
Task completion times (in-app data mining).
Reported HRIS-related incidents.
Expected outcome
Within a quarter:
20 ± 5 % reduction in HRIS-related tickets.
30 ± 5 % increase in self-service task completion.
Improved DEX score for targeted applications (at least +8 points)
Improved sentiment score.
Cross-reference these metrics with employee attrition for possible correlation.
Execution model & project timeline
Project duration: Q3, Q4. Execution stages:
Establishing and onboarding Adopt workforce. Granting corresponding permissions. Confirming target devices have Adopt. Stakeholders: Adoption project owners, IT.
Configure Adopt guides for the target web application. Including setting up alerts to monitor broken guides. Stakeholders: Nexthink admins.
Define guides and key messages > build content. Stakeholders: Application owners and experts.
Run a usability acceptance test (UAT) and collect feedback and improvement suggestions. Stakeholders: Adoption project owners and focus groups.
Announce guides availability through internal comms and campaigns. Stakeholders: Adoption project owners and Nexthink admins.
Report on DAP success including high-level business impact. Stakeholders: Project owners, Application owners and leadership.
Training your digital adoption team on how to use Adopt
Educate the established workforce—with corresponding accounts, permission roles and responsibilities—to use Nexthink Adopt for guide deployment and monitoring:
The Adopt documentation contains all Adopt-related procedures and tooling. The following pages are particularly useful for beginners:
Introduction to Adopt.
Getting started with Adopt for a brief concepts and features overview.
Deploying a guide: end-to-end procedure is a one-page summary with all steps to launch in-app Adopt guides.
The Optimizing digital adoption with Nexthink self-paced learning path in Nexthink Learn effectively upskills your team to recognize and implement all Adopt features for content deployment.
Confirming target devices meet Nexthink Adopt prerequisites
Double-check with your IT department that target devices across your organization—subject to the digital adoption solution—meet Nexthink Adopt requirements.
This includes prerequisites such as Nexthink browser extension deployment.
Step 3 - Designing an in-app guidance experience with Adopt
With an approved digital adoption strategy, the next step is to design an employee-guidance experience in Nexthink Adopt.
Applications owners and experts must develop and preview guide overlays using Adopt Editor directly from the target web application, making sure content aligns with the task frictions and their corresponding personas identified during the discovery phase.
Instructional writing tips for guides
Lead with action: Use clear, verb-driven sentences that highlight both the task and the outcome. Example: “Use this dashboard to confirm issues in X.”
Prefer active voice: Write in active voice to clarify who is doing what. Reserve passive voice for exceptions with no alternative.
Keep it concise: Aim for sentences of 10–15 words long. Brevity improves scannability and helps employees absorb instructions quickly.
Bold UI text on webpage elements, for example: “Open the Reports tab to view export options.”
Break up multi-step instructions: Use Adopt guide steps for sequences and avoid stacking multiple actions in a single guide overlay.
Step 4 - Testing and deploying in-app Adopt guides
Run a user acceptance test (UAT) to ensure that in-app content works as expected under contextually accurate guide-targeting rules.
Set up monitors and alerts to proactively detect issues in guide flows, such as overlay breaks due to UI changes.
Rely on Adoption and guide details dashboards for insights on employee-guide interactions and engagement.
Collect feedback from user acceptance test (UAT) participants.
Based on the results, redesign improvements for your Adopt guides.
Optionally, consider implementing A/B testing by designating a control group that doesn't receive in-app support guidance. This helps you demonstrate the effectiveness of the digital adoption solution, especially when reporting project outcomes.
Publish all guides for the target web application.
Communicate—using Nexthink campaigns—to all employees and stakeholders that the digital adoption solution is now available.
Step 5 - Monitoring engagement and optimizing guides
Post-deployment, continuously use Nexthink Infinity analytics to monitor the effectiveness, perception, and adoption of published guides. Additionally, when feasible, conduct data mining directly from the target web application. This approach enables guide enhancement and optimization.
Track and analyze:
Guide engagement dashboards for behavioral impact: task completion time, drop-off rates, user flow changes.
Applications dashboards for overall application performance and usage.
DEX scores and employee sentiment post-deployment.
Feedback surveys employee satisfaction with the digital adoption solution.
Step 6 - Balancing digital adoption success
A successful digital adoption strategy isn’t just about putting guides in front of users—it’s about impacting and supporting employee experience and, as a result, driving organizational productivity and efficiency.
Report to stakeholders and leadership the results of your digital adoption solution:
Connect employee sentiment, experience data, and application usage to correlate the digital adoption solution with the project's expected outcome.
Identify and discover new opportunities based on executed project data.
Think of different levels of achievements for investment returns: employee satisfaction, application performance, output productivity, and resource allocation efficiency. Ultimately, you should observe tangible value increments for your clients as a result of digital adoption.
To maintain objectivity in reporting, follow Nexthink dashboards and insights for identifying correlations and isolating variables. This way, you avoid over-attributing outcomes to adoption efforts without sufficient validation.
In addition, support observations with evidence-based frameworks such as statistical correlation measures (e.g., Pearson’s R) or controlled comparisons (A/B testing).
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