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friction
on product designlast updated 7/31/20
Friction is frustrating. It's that spotty internet connection, line at the DMV, conversation we'll just put off until tomorrow type feeling.
And so we usually avoid it. We choose the path of least resistance. You could argue that Tinder and Grubhub are not innovative — online dating and food delivery have been around for a while now — but that they are simply better at catering to our laziness.
While I'm grateful these services exist, I can't help but wonder whether their tactics could be applied to other domains for greater impact.
Calm is a great example. Founded by two serial entrepreneurs, the popular meditation aid is one of few popular mobile apps with predominantly happy users.
It's the rare business that has aligned its own incentives with customer well-being: increased usage is healthier for users and the company's bottom line. Calm didn't invent meditation. They're simply better at packaging up meditation in an attractive, frictionless way.
Repl.it is tackling a hairier problem.
Setting up a text editor like VSCode, let alone an entire development environment, is hard. Following a painstakingly detailed guide from my coding bootcamp, it still took me two hours and plenty of wrong turns before finally getting squared away.
With Repl.it, you can start writing code in about ten seconds. No need for a complicated environment or even to create an account with them.
While engineering managers need their people to use something more powerful, Repl.it is perfect for beginners. And in my opinion, that’s where there's an enormous opportunity for positive impact.
Many industries would benefit from a larger supply of talented engineers. An enormous bottleneck here is the volume of people who choose to learn how to code in the first place. When fewer people try, even fewer develop baseline proficiency, and even fewer ultimately reach a hireable level of competency. Beginnings are the bottleneck.
Trying something new is always difficult. There will be a lot more people who make this choice, who choose to begin learning how to code, if beginning is just a little easier. And Repl.it makes beginning a little easier.
Websites and apps are tiny worlds. In contrast to our messy, unpredictable lives, every last detail of these digital environments can be curated to direct users' actions.
This power comes with the responsibility to consider how we're designing such environments and what actions we're incentivizing.
What would the world look like if wellness and education were addictive? Users deserve to be treated not as lab rats or cash cows, but as people.