Friction is the enemy!

Naked survivalists hate this one thing 🤬

Not so very long ago I’d fly up to Seattle/Bellevue a few times a month. I’d roll early with coffee in hand walking fast to stay warm, cutting through parking lots to the office and then commence the running around to reviews and meetings, scribbling on whiteboards and running stairs between floors. Lunch from the cafe on the top floor for a meeting or to bring back in front of the computer. Escape 6ish and grab a fat plate of chicken teriyaki (w/ three broccoli pieces for color 🥦🥦🥦) to take back to the hotel and scarf down while working on data/slides for the next day.

Turn on the TV - Naked and Afraid was my road warrior buddy. Queue survivalist #1 bragging about primitive fire making skills and in the next scene he/she is rubbing two sticks together like mad failing repeatedly to create fire - much to survivalist #2’s disapproval. When survivalists can’t boil water to purify it, they get thirsty, argue and ultimately someone (usually #1) drinks forbidden water and gets a tummy ache and then it’s oh so sad. A few seasons back the producers or audience or both got tired of this tortuous routine, so they started handing out fire starters before the clothes came off, boo.

Conclusion: Friction bad.

Friction in Tech is the same but different.

Don’t Make Me Think.

Computer Science and its associated fields including hardware, software and design continue to evolve like mad, but they’ve only been around 75 years or so. Relatively young field compared to say Physics that’s been around over 400 years. So, it makes sense that Computer Science terminology borrows liberally from other fields and terms - but the translation is often surprising. So, Friction -

According to Physics:

Friction is a force that opposes relative motion between surfaces in contact.

According to User Experience (UX) or Digital Design:

Friction is anything that prevents or slows down a user from completing their intended task.

Too many clicks of the mouse, scrolling too far for what you need, requiring a login or email, too many seconds for your landing page to load, unclear call-to-action in landing page, convoluted checkout/booking/purchase process - friction is killing your users 💀

UX Guru Steve Krug puts it a different way - Don’t Make Me Think. A slightly longer quote:

Good UX should require the absolute minimum amount of cognitive effort and steps necessary to complete a task.

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS

In the now surprisingly relevant 80’s movie WarGames, the WOPR AI computer realizes playing chess is more fun than everyone getting dead in global thermonuclear war. Here’s what WOPR says when he learns some games like tic-tac-toe are unwinnable:

Joshua/WOPR: GREETINGS, PROFESSOR FALKEN. Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua. Joshua/WOPR: A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY. HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

For a skoosh more drama than naked people getting tummy aches, check out the dramatic ending here. Spoiler - earth avoids destruction as WOPR learns Global Thermonuclear war is unwinnable.

Games are more fun to play than making fires with friction.

I used to teach a 2 day class on an especially dense subject that was a grind for everyone. The best part was at the end, when everybody’s head was full up, and we’d play a mocked-up version of Jeopardy to see if anyone remembered anything and I got to be Alex Trebek.

I started playing a new online game from the New York Times called Connections. It released a few months ago and is quickly taking over as the NYT’s most popular game since Josh Wardle's Wordle took off a couple of years ago during the pandemic. The game is simple (this key to so many things that go viral - no friction!). Each puzzle has four groups of words ‘that share a common thread.’ Group the words without messing up more than 4 times and you win!

So I made a Wirepine Connections for you all out of a bunch of common words that mean one thing in your head and something sorta different but kinda related in a realm of Computer Science. You have a head start with the word FRICTION and the category UX. Find the other three words that belong to UX and then three other groupings of four words each.

See if you can figure it out! Hints¹ and Answers² at the end.

The Wirepine Weekly case study in Friction

Back to Friction. Last week I did a little experiment. I posted the first Wirepine Weekly DIGEST. It’s a curated list of everything I’ve written with a little color commentary. It gave me a break from writing and also gave new subscribers/readers a reference if they wanted to find an article they missed.

It was also a test in Friction. I used the post to create a new Newsletter called ‘The Wirepine Weekly DIGEST’ that’s hosted on LinkedIn. I won’t publish my weekly articles there, but whenever I post a new digest (every couple months) I’ll add it as an article on the LinkedIn DIGEST newsletter. The Wirepine Weekly continues to be hosted on Substack.

I mentioned last week that I passed 100 subscribers - thank you thank you all again for that!💯

Here’s how I got to 100:

The extended Friends & Family push was the biggest jump. I thought I’d get more out of LinkedIn because in my previous life I’d grown to over 800 followers but not so much - I did get a lot of engagement on my posts as well as new readers but only a handful more subscribers. Facebook gave a nice bump when I started posting over there which surprised me since I’ve been off that platform going on 5 years, but it has some old friends.

Guess how many subscribers I got in one week since my LinkedIn DIGEST experiment? Over 80! What took 3 months of street fighting on Substack I got in 7 days on LinkedIn. 10% conversion rate (and still going up) - I’ll take it! I know you know why - no Friction! ³

LinkedIn is a Walled Garden - as long as you stay inside everything is available to you sans friction. This is no different than any other social media platform - Instagram, FB, X aka Twitter, TikTok- they all try their very best to keep you inside their beautiful garden. Should you climb over the wall to chase content 🌈’s outside their garden or an external link that somehow got through, they lose eyeballs and now whose gunna watch those ads 🤑

Here’s how it works to subscribe to The Wirepine Weekly DIGEST newsletter in the garden of LinkedIn:

1. You get a post in your feed that Andrew/Wirepine has started a new newsletter including the first DIGEST article.

2. Click or tap to read it from your feed and you can subscribe right there with another click. No additional steps needed - it’s just another flower to smell in the garden!

3. But here’s the best part. Say it get’s buried in your feed or you miss it or scroll on by, LI will drop an alert under the Notifications Bell saying hey look there’s a new Newsletter that someone you follow is publishing. Why not click this pretty green checkbox to subscribe? You don’t have to think to do that!

Substack is a more open platform in that they encourage goodness across all of the internets to be compiled, referenced, incorporated, cited, etc. But they do need an email to send you my newsletter.

Here’s how subscribing on Substack goes:

1. Click the link wherever you find it - email, forward, etc. - that takes you to a website (wait for site to render …)

2. Surprise! Substack asks for your email and wait you just wanted to read an article.

3. So you click ‘letmecheckitout first’ and read

4. If you want to subscribe from within the article that’s another few clicks

5. If you did put your email in step 2, Substack throws a couple of more questions your way (gah, why!?) and now you’re starting to doubt if you wanted to read my article after all!

Here’s another way to think about it. Context Switching. Pulling an Uno reverse card here on a term that originated in Computer Science, but now we’re using it to talk about human productivity or cognition.

In Computer Science, Context Switching allows computers to multi-task. A computer (a single CPU) can only do one task at a time. They’re only worth a dang because they do everything lickety-split. In order to do multiple tasks, a CPU will store the state of the current process or thread it’s working on, pick up another and then retrieve that prior state or context when it’s time to progress on the prior task. For a computer, Context Switching is a good thing.

It’s not a good thing for humans. For humans it means your squishy brain gets interrupted while you were progressing on one task and that throws you off your mojo. You’re on your way to read an interesting article but wait you have to type in an email!? This not only has a negative effect on your intent to finish the original task, but it significantly slows down and may kill ever completing that first task.

Wipe away Friction

Look at your website, your online store, your email campaigns - where can you reduce friction? Don’t trust yourself - watch someone try to book an appointment online or order something from your store or contact you or take action from an email campaign. Identify the friction, make things require less thinking, less clicking, less scrolling.

Light that fire and watch your conversion rates increase!

1. HINT: The four categories are: UX (Design), Relational Database Verbs, Cloud Architecture, and the Software Development

<this is a blank line so you don’t see the ANSWER cuz you want to use this HINT!>

<here’s another - at least give it a try>

<and one more - just take a looksee>

<last one … I get it, common words but foreign language, scroll for ANSWER>

2. ANSWER

UX:

1. FRICTION: see above 🙄

2. MOCK: Visual representation of the design; can be low or high-fidelity illustration of screens, interface elements and the flow between them.

3. STORY: Written description of feature from the user’s POV.

4. WIREFRAME: Rough page interface drawings focusing on space allocation, layout, functionality, and intended behaviors for early and rapid iteration.

Relational Database Verbs:

1. DROP: Delete a table, row, index, etc. … Permanently!

2. JOIN: Combine columns from two or more tables into a new one.

3. SELECT: Return data/rows from database by query.

4. KEY: Unique identifier of rows in a table, data can be re-keyed to optimize.

Cloud Architecture:

1. Cloud: hosted collection of hardware and software components to deliver services.

2. Mesh: layer that facilitates communication between cloud components.

3. Container: Portable package of software with all the bits needed to run in different clouds.

4. Fabric: Hardware, network or data layer to connect cloud and on-premises endpoints.

Software Development:

1. MVP: Minimum Viable Product- bare minimum features needed to ship something usable to get user feedback and iterate.

2. Sprint: Window of time like a week or two allotted to get a specific set of work items done (coded).

3. Build: Check-in/merge/compile the code from latest sprints for an updated app version.

4. Backlog: Prioritized list of features to be incorporated in future sprints.

3. Don’t pay Harvard Business Review for case studies; Wirepine’s got you!