Stewart Butterfield: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So yes, and there's also another issue around friction, which is it became like a mantra or just kind of an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction. And in some cases that's true. We would talk about it in Slack. It was hard to market. It was hard to explain what it was if you had never used it before. You could say a messaging app for businesses or whatever, but a critical disadvantage to Slack doing out-of-home advertising, putting up a billboard versus beer or cars is, no one needs to be explained why they would want a car or beer, but everyone will have to explain one day why they want Slack. And so the problem there is comprehension, and this will come up an enormous amount. So now imagine you want to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert in San Francisco and you go to the Ticketmaster website. If you think about both your comprehension, it's perfect to this case. And that translates into the specificity of your intent and the degree of your intent is also kind of maxed out. So look, I really want to get these tickets. I know exactly what they are. They're Taylor Swift tickets for this date at this venue. And so in that scenario, it doesn't really matter if Ticketmaster's website is slow, it doesn't really matter if the payments page errors out, you're going to persist and get through it. So obviously they're better to reduce friction, but in some sense there's not a huge amount of value in doing that. For most creators of products, there are a handful of cases where that really is true for you as well. And they include things like user registration, authentication, checkout flows for e-commerce. I am significantly more likely to buy something if there's Apple Pay or Shop Pay or something like that. I'm significantly less likely to carry through the purchase of something if I have to manually enter all of the fields of my address one at a time rather than having one of those address pickers. It's crazy, but the issue is my intent isn't always 100%, and the specificity of my intent isn't always 100%. So if your thing is direct to consumer T-shirts and you acquire customers through Instagram ads, all of them know what T-shirts are. It's like, "This looks like a good T-shirt to me." But I'm rarely 100% intent. I might have a very specific intent, but my intent's like 70%. So if you're, the amount of friction is above that, I'm not going to do it. But now, okay, people coming to Slack.com, some friend had mentioned Slack and talked their ear off at some point months ago, and then they saw a news article and then they saw someone's tweet and then they saw an ad on about the website they were visiting and they finally said, "Okay, I'm going to go to this website." So their intent is at the absolute minimum threshold, it was before that last event happened, they were below and now they're above, but they're just above. d, "Okay, I'm going to go to this website." So their intent is at the absolute minimum threshold, it was before that last event happened, they were below and now they're above, but they're just above. The specificity of their intent like, "I need to get Taylor Swift concerts for this date at this venue." Is also very low, because they're like, "It's a work thing. I'm not sure it's a spreadsheet or a calendar or exactly what it is." So they were coming in at 0.1% over these critical thresholds. What was the challenge? It wasn't friction, because it's not like they were aiming for something and they knew what they were aiming for and they were just trying to get themselves to that point. What we had to worry about was creating comprehension and in two senses, what is this thing? And what am I supposed to do next? And that creation of comprehension in the sense of explaining stuff, that creation of comprehension in the sense of the design of the UI, of the screen, of the page or whatever, and the visual hierarchy and the affordances that are there and the indication of things to interact with and which thing should be the next thing to do and all that stuff, that becomes really critical. And I think very, very few people recognize that. They're like, "I want to get people who come to my webpage to the sign up form as quickly as possible." But if they don't know what they're signing up for and they don't know what it's going to do after, is it going to spam them? They don't know, "Am I going to have to pay on the next step or what?" Then they're just going to back out. And this was a lifelong battle because the remove friction orientation is so deep in people. Again, it really makes a difference in those cases where people do have an intent and they do know what they're trying to do is a poor approach when the challenge is really comprehension, and I think the secret is most, 70%, 80% or whatever of a product design is in that comprehension step because people, if they do ever open the preferences tab and look at all the options, rarely have an idea. And if you can't teach them or make it possible for them to discover what the capabilities are, then they're not going to take advantage of them and they're not going to get as much out of it. And I think that the trick is for most of the unique parts of any application, most of the specific things that your app, your product, your software does are areas where the challenge is going to be comprehension inside of friction. It really could be anything Shopify, the purpose of the service for its end users is generally going to be kind to clear. But most people, most first-time store openers don't know that they can get reports or if they know that they can get reports, they don't know what kinds of reports. And if they know what kinds of reports they can get, they don't know how they can tweak them and what the timing should be and which things that are more important to display. And I could go on and on and on and on, and people just don't recognize that. So I want to see if this is still true. I'm just going to open my phone and clock app. And they had the craziest description for alarms. on and on and on and on, and people just don't recognize that. So I want to see if this is still true. I'm just going to open my phone and clock app. And they had the craziest description for alarms. It's a little bit different, but people can look at their own phone. So I have, it says alarms and it says sleep and a vertical bar, wake up and says, no alarm, and a button that says change. And then if you hit it, it says sleep is off. In order to automatically turn on sleep features and edit your schedule, you need to turn sleep on. So obviously sleep was a good name for this thing if you already had a way of getting people to understand it. If you don't, it's ungrammatical and incomprehensible and why would you ever do it? And I got to guess, it's been like this for years, 90 plus percent and maybe 98% of people just do what I do, which is that you just create, "I want the alarm on and I'm going to set the time for it." And I don't know what turning sleep on does, but it's just the lack of comprehension prevents people from getting the value. And I'm sure that there's a bunch of value behind turning sleep on, whatever that means and people spend a lot of time on those features and it integrates with biometrics and your watch or who knows. Again, I still don't know because turning sleep on is like, what does that do? And what is it going to cost me? And what impact it's going to have? Those examples are just to me all over the place. And the reason I don't use most software where there was an actual choice point or the reason I don't use most features where there was a choice point for me is because I didn't understand what they were going to do and I don't give a shit. And if there is one mantra that I would use to replace that it's, Don't Make Me Think, I don't know if you remember that book.…

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