Everything I try and do, I try to reduce friction.
By the way, I internalize so many of my beliefs and philosophies such as this, that I start to assume other people share them. Or if not, that they’re low IQ and don’t have the intellectual or mental capacity for e.g. consideration of how their actions affect others. Anyway…
I try and design or suggest the UI needs that make sense. Why 3 clicks when I could be one? Why any clicks if not necessary? Usually this means “reduce/remove” visual clutter as well.
I write comprehensive README.md files in my software repositories at work, in order to reduce the friction that other developers will have onboarding / learning a new system or software component.
I use Markdown files as my preference because they’re small, contain no fluff and don’t have the friction of loading e.g. a Google doc or MS Word document, which usually needs to have permissions set, etc. More friction. Access control issues are a huge point of friction, and many orgs just default to assuming that lots of friction (and user frustration) is necessary because they can’t seem to find the balance between what’s necessary for confidentiality and availability / reducing user friction internally.
More thoughts on access controls: there should be a default org-level user permission which generally allows all members of an organization to contribute helpfully – a medium ground. It’s not necessarily “no access”, or even “read-only”. It might be “comment” level access – anyone in the organization can read and even comment on items, but maybe not write and definitely not admin. I’m describing generic permission levels but these generally map to pretty close equivalents for most things: GitHub / GitLab, Microsoft Cloud, Google Cloud/Docs, etc. Even AWS, though that permission model is infinitely nuanced and probably deserves its own note.
Anyway, back to the main point – if you’re not reducing the friction for whatever you do, why not? Are you just a process gatekeeper? Are your actions even directly contributing to the main goals of your organization?
I had more ideas and thoughts on this when I thought of writing this post, but that was several hours ago, and there was too much friction in my writing workflow (was on my phone and taking care of the kids), so I didn’t get this out in time to stay in flow.