Overcoming friction for the greater good

Last Updated on Tuesday, 3 January 2006 12:46 Written by Steve Tuesday, 3 January 2006 12:38

One of the things I really like about commiting to writing blog posts about once a week is that it has made me prick my ears up when I have more than one conversation about a topic. If the same thing comes up twice, in different contexts, it makes me realize it might be important.

Twice in the last week I have found myself talking about how the key to creating shared value in a technology system is removing the friction for the individual user to create content that is valuable for the group. The first time this came up was with Netflix, the movie sharing service.

Whenever they list a movie, they show the overall rating that users have given the movie:

When you mouse over the stars, they turn gold and you can click on them to set your rating. When you click to set your rating, it gets put in the database. No page refresh, no change other than the 4.5 red stars turns to 4 gold stars.

When you rate a movie, you don’t get kicked out of your current context. You aren’t abused by a big popup that says “YOU’VE RATED FOG OF WAR 4 STARS!” They’ve made rating nearly frictionless. It’s so easy that before I knew it, I had rated 312 movies. No way I would have gotten past 10 if they hadn’t removed the friction.

Ratings are great for me to remember what movies I like, but they’re even better for others on Netflix. My rating adds to Netflix’s aggregate rating that everyone sees when browsing movies. Even better, my Netflix “friends” can see all my ratings, which they can weigh based on what they know about me, and my taste in movies. They get value from this, not becuase I’m a great movie critic, but becuase it’s some more information in their decision making process.

This same concept–removing hurdles for users to create value for others–came up today in an email conversation with a smart colleague who is building CRM for nonprofits. He’s working through how to build functionality that will allow a history of all communications with a constituent to be centralized in one place. He knows what he’s up against–too much friction and the users won’t do the extra work to get the shared benefit. But if he builds it well, users might not even notice that they’re contributing to the whole.

This kind of design is one of the hardest parts of “social” technology systems, and it’s on the top of my mind this week.

1 Comment

1. Karen   |  Sunday, 29 January 2006 at 9:38 pm

   Hey!
   I’m trying to fill my Netflix que with random movie watchers. I’ve only got 3 friends and some of the best flicks I’ve seen come as recommendations.
   I’d love for you to send me an invite!

   Thanx.

   k