How hard is it for employees of a client organization to adopt their new site after launch, and settle into performing their new tasks with confidence? What role in adoption is played by learning to use the site? What general planning, and specifically what user experience design, will lead to higher success with this important --and often overlooked-- piece of the project?

This session is both for Drupal shops and clients who need to involve larger teams in the myriad tasks of growing and maintaining sites after launch.

When organizations roll out the site to employees, change can be met with resistance. Now experts in areas other than web development need to wield unfamiliar, web-based tools and follow new protocols. They face a learning curve when they work to post articles, build forms, modify navigation, manage communities or affect deeper aspects of the site. Failures can be highly visible and embarrassing. The care and attention that the professional development team brought to building the site needs to be continued by its new stewards, so pressure can (rightly) be high.

A great first interaction with the site can make all the difference. A well laid out path to discovering how the site makes their lives easier will better enable them to accomplish their objectives, play a part in increasing (rather than degrading) the value of the site for end users, and how they can continually improve and deepen early adopters are empowered to help their colleagues.

We'll present reasons to start work on learning materials at the beginning of a project, and a more usable, successful approach than delivering 'user manuals' in MS Word documents. We'll make the case for incorporating learning materials tightly into the project effort from discovery and development.

Importantly, we'll lay out a process for discovering, building and presenting the experience of adopting a new site that achieves the same quality we expect of every project deliverable.