The SlipNSlide: a lesson for Designers?

All around us, hidden forces are making it difficult to reach our goals. As Experience Designers, Enterprise Architects, Agile & Organisational Modellers, or Change Managers - we essentially all follow the same design philosophies, and we can see a better approach when we understand the source of what's holding people back. To understand the basis of the friction is to understand what is acting as a drag on innovation and change.

With the recent hot weather in Australia lately, I enjoyed listening to the "Hottest 100" in the backyard with some water, fun, food and company over the weekend. It reminded me of enjoying the ol' Slip N Slide growing up.

Do you remember that activity? You'd roll out a long sheet of plastic across your lawn, and the goal was to run up, flop out onto it and let it carry you across its length. You might remember that if there wasn't enough water on the slide it could be... well... not fun

The activity requires you to utilise it wet - nominally because it's designed to create less friction on the surface. Yet, while plastic's seen as a smooth, even repellant, material, it isn't without friction, and water is not a lubricant. If you've ever tried using the slide when it was dry, partially wet - or when you were wearing the bare minimum for decency - both of those facts became obvious.

[friction burn image redacted for the squeamish]

We quickly discovered that adding something slippery, like liquid soap, to the tarp beforehand made for a much better experience. Why? Because as professional swimmers discover - no amount of work on your propulsive force is ever enough to overcome the friction. That is why swimmers seek ways to reduce their wake (friction) to improve their times.

It struck me that it's also an excellent analogy for our work in design.

No, not the Slip N Slide -?identifying friction and what to do about it.

As Experience Designers, Enterprise Architects, Agile & Organisational Modellers, or Change Managers - we essentially all follow the same design philosophies.

So, at its most basic level, design friction slows the user down or makes it hard for them to accomplish their task.

Although this sounds like a bad thing, in some cases, it can be beneficial to add strategic friction to improve the user experience. It's like adding padding underneath the last bit of the Slip N Slide to create an incline and slow users down before they hit the fence, or bowl anyone over.

The case of the unsold sofa

Loran Nordgren (Professor of Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management) has a great example of a furniture company, which they refer to as 'Beach House' (that's not the company's actual name), that makes fully customisable sofas and chairs.

The grand pitch is that you end up with a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture akin to your own customised art.

Their target audience is 20 to 30-year-olds. Often, this may be their first piece of adult furniture, and they love the idea. So whether they would go into the design showroom or do it online, people would spend hours designing the perfect sofa for themselves.

Now people like the idea. They're coming in spending hours designing the sofas they wanted, but then, customers disappeared. The order wasn't submitted. The sale didn't occur.

What else can we do to make the idea more attractive?

In management's mind, they thought perhaps they need to reduce the price further, thereby making their product more attractive? Maybe they need a better customer experience? Should they invest in better sales training? Perhaps they need to create higher quality fabrics and materials? What else can they do to make the idea more attractive?

And in many ways, this seems so intuitive.

If you're a company that finds that people are not buying your product, if you want to grow, if you want more customers, you may say, "we need to improve our product". "We'll give them a better deal" or "we need to market ourselves better".

David Schonthal (Professor of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School of Management) was engaged to undertake an ethnographic deep dive into the needs and backgrounds of these disappearing customers. And one idea no one had considered came up again and again -- people didn't know what to do with their existing sofa!

Think about it; it's not as if they were sitting on the floor; they've got an existing sofa, and they loved what Beach House had to offer. Still, at some point, it occurred to them that they cannot move forward with this thing they want to do until they figure out what to do with their current sofa because they can't have two.

So the questions customers would be asking themselves would be things like:

• Can I sell it? How long will that take? Do I sell it before or after I order my new couch? Will I be left without a sofa for a prolonged period? Will I end up with two sofas I need to manage until I get rid of the old one?
• Do I toss the old one out? Can I physically move it? Do I put it out on the street? Is there some special day or service I need to be aware of? If I do that, will it get picked up?

As soon as they understood this new friction, the solution was simple - offer to pick up existing sofas upon delivery. And the moment that option was provided, that conversion problem - that disappearing customer conundrum - largely disappeared.

The story's lesson is that Beach House didn't need to push harder to make the sale. Customers were already sold on all those things. What was needed was to remove a hidden impediment that kept customers from completing the purchase.

It's also true in a crisis

Sometimes they would even walk up to the door, and at the last second, they would turn away.

Let me tell you the story of a Nevada hero named Stacy Alonso.

In 2004, she served as a board member of The Shade Tree, a shelter for women and children who've experienced domestic abuse and homelessness.

They noticed women pull up to the shelter and stare at it for minutes or even hours. Sometimes they would even walk up to the door, and at the last second, they would turn away. This happened again and again.

And the question is, why would they turn away?

And she discovered what they were seeing was a sign on the door that said?no pets allowed.

So if you are in a troubling domestic relationship, the benefits of escaping that relationship are often obvious. This realisation, this strong emotional sense that they cannot leave a pet behind, however, was holding people back.

So to break this barrier and as a way to solve this problem, she opened Noah's Animal House in 2007. A full-service pet shelter located right on the grounds of the domestic violence shelter in Las Vegas.

It was the first of its kind in the US -- having cat condos, indoor and outdoor dog runs, a vet station and a grooming station all together in one facility. They check in to the women's shelter, and the pets are right next door at Noah's, And they're free of abuse and safe.

Women can visit and take care of their pets as often as they'd like. The shelter also has "cuddle rooms," set up like living rooms, where women can spend time with their pets.

How successful has this removal of friction been? As of 2019, women have travelled from 21 states specifically to reach Noah's Animal House.

Friction is Inevitable, Not Insurmountable

Suppose you don't study what's holding people back. In that case, it can seem as if there's some invisible force that's demotivating people and keeping them from taking action. So the stock response in these situations is to push people harder, adding those carrots or sticks; it's the propulsive-force fuel approach.

It's because we naturally understand behaviour in terms of internal forces, things like motivation and intent. Understanding behaviour and interpreting it in terms of internal forces, like motivation, perfectly maps to the propulsive-force fuel model.

The job of fuel is to elevate and enhance the appeal of an idea by using incentives, using an emotional appeal, giving data evidence; all of that is designed to demonstrate the value of the new idea and initiative.

So you're trying to launch a new product, and maybe people aren't buying. The way the mind understands that is to assume that the appeal, the allure, is insufficient. So, if that's the problem you imagine, the way you solve that problem is to elevate appeal, and fuel does that job.

Whereas, friction is the psychological force (or the set of forces) that resist change.

Frictions take different forms, and often we neither seek them out nor talk about them, but in essence, frictions act as a drag on innovation and change.

Yet, we can see a better approach when we understand the source of what's holding people back to understand the basis of the friction.

However, it's not as sexy.

Friction requires discovery. Friction tends to demand that we shift attention from the idea itself, which is our natural fixation point. Instead, we start to consider the audience. The broader contextual emotional needs of the audience. So, frictions tend to be buried and therefore require discovery. They require knowing our audience, perspective-taking and understanding the context.

The problem goes even deeper. It's not just that we need to pay attention to both fuel and friction. Sometimes fuel creates additional friction. Becoming aware of friction means re-examining our stock responses of using fuel to get what we want; we sometimes fail to see that it can produce its own resistance in some ways.

This is the folly of the propulsive force approach. So if you think about when we push on people, their instinct is to push back. So you see that the propulsive force approach doesn't move the people who are open to change, and it often makes things worse for those who reject the message.

Even the best ideas in organisations can face resistance. Motivational messages can backfire; perfectly polite signs can make people more prone to bad behaviour.

Once we understand that no behaviour happens in a vacuum, but occurs in a dynamic environment, we can gain contextual insights into how changing even the smallest attributes of the environment can have a profound influence on how people think and act.

All around us, hidden forces are making it difficult to reach our goals, close a sale, or convince others to adopt new ideas. When organisations meet resistance all too often, they focus on adding fuel, building better products, selling harder or marketing better.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Yet, many organisations fail to go beyond that perspective. We tend to underestimate the power of these frictions dramatically. Often small changes can have such a dramatic impact on behaviour.

Following the path of least resistance is often the first friction that we have to contend with. And it turns out there are at least three other kinds of friction. One is the issue of inertia. Much of the time, when we review something, a new change, a new proposal, a new product, we're often comparing it to what we have, to the status quo.

The human mind reflexively favours the familiar over the unfamiliar, even when the benefits of the unfamiliar option are indisputable. And we tend to favour the system we are in over better, new ways of doing things. And this inertia tends to be greatest when we pursue big, radical change. The problem is that the more significant the change, the more resistance people have because that unfamiliarity is the inherent friction.

If you've suggested a new idea at work and watched it get shot down because it's too novel, you've just encountered the friction of inertia.

The third form of friction is related to the first two. People don't just pursue the path of least resistance when it comes to things involving effort. They seek the path of least resistance when it comes to their emotions. People experience emotional friction, even when doing something that they're highly motivated to do.

This is not the first insight that it takes a lot of trial and error for people to arrive, whether it's swimming or cycling, for them to come to appreciate how critical friction is and how costly trying to improve performance just through more exertion, more force, really is.

When Netflix automatically plays the next episode of a TV series, it's reducing the tiny friction of requiring you to choose to watch the next episode. Now, the reduction in friction seems trivial. How much effort does it take to pick up a remote and hit play? But Netflix and other streaming companies have found that reducing this tiny friction has significant effects. The result is a lot more streaming a lot more binge-watching.

Where there's dysfunction, there's friction.

Dysfunction in the workplace is often a common topic unearthed as part of almost any design activity.

Whether administrative-based (improper use of tools or procedures) or relationship-based (a communication breakdown somewhere that's causing frustration) - these friction-based dysfunctions can look like this:

• Employees operating outside of standard operating procedure to move their projects along,
• Employees not using a new tool or process,
• Employees using 'Shadow IT' and workarounds,
• A culture of finger-pointing or blame deflection,
• Employee misalignment with strategy,
• Complaints of a lack of proper knowledge, information overload or numerous communication channels,

Frictions take different forms, and often we neither seek them out nor talk about them, but in essence, frictions act as a drag on innovation and change.

Not only do these highlight frictions worth exploring - but they may be the cause of decreased employee engagement and discontent.

Friction is a process of discovery.

We cannot understand what's holding us back until we take the time and trouble to see things from our employees, customers, clients, and partners points of view.

Friction is a process of discovery. It requires understanding the needs of the people that we are trying to serve. And the better insight we have, the better position we are to understand and remove the frictions that hold people back. And there are different ways to achieve that level of insight and perspective.

Then, when you generate those ideas, you need to let them own them.

Ideas are like kids in that people always love their own more than any other.

The intuitive role of the innovator is to have the idea and push for change. A master of influence and innovation is going to understand that through co-design through co-ownership, we want people to commit themselves to these ideas.

Admittedly, this is easier said than done. If you want to bring about change, you want the people you are trying to change to feel like they're authors of that change.

So how do you go about creating the conditions for self-persuasion?

Self-persuasion begins by understanding our space of alignment and establishing that baseline of agreement.

You and I might both recognise that we need to change practices. If we disagree on how to solve this particular problem, and that's where we begin the conversation, then we're already starting at a place of misalignment. We need to stop telling people what to think, and instead, we need to ask.

We need to let people provide their perspectives. To explain their context and to listen to their experience without judgement or contradiction.

That's not a place our minds naturally reside.

But, if we give that space - where we listen carefully, not providing counterarguments until they have voiced and expressed themselves. Then, we can ask the question: "Are you open to a different point of view?" or "I see the merits of your position, but I have some concerns. Are you open to a different perspective?"?

Now we are able to start at a place of alignment.

In asking, we discover.

In discovering, we see more of the context.

With context, we gain understanding.

Understanding even the smallest of variances can provide insights that allow us to design to surmount those previously invisible forces and improve the outcome we're working towards, with a fraction less friction.

Anyhow, that's my thoughts, and now I think that if the weather's great, it may be time to roll out the ol' slip N slide again this weekend ... and, no, I won't forget the soap!