Hinge's CEO was at SXSW London saying they build friction into the product on purpose. In Hinge's own write-up of the session: "We're always thinking about how to help people build the muscle and develop the strength required to connect with another human."
An engagement business, making itself harder to use.
Meanwhile this industry has spent thirty years taking friction out and calling it maturity. Deflection, containment, self-service, effort scores, portals nobody wants and everybody has.
And most of that was right. Nobody ever grew as a person from repeating their account number to a third agent.
Two kinds of friction
But there are two kinds of friction and we've never separated them. There's the friction that costs someone their afternoon. And there's the friction that costs someone something and hands them something back.
On a dashboard they're identical. Both are effort, both move the number the wrong way, so we take out both, and we've got very good at it.
I've done it myself, in the small way nobody logs. Someone's got a call they're dreading, I know how it goes, it's quicker if I take it. Everyone's relieved. And I've just removed the only twenty minutes that week they'd have learned anything from.
Where the judgement is supposed to come from
I've argued for a while that the work shifts right, that software absorbs the volume and people move up to the judgement calls. I still think that's where this goes.
But I've been light on where the judgement is supposed to come from. It comes from having sat with things you couldn't do yet. Nowhere else. And we're automating exactly those first, for the most junior people in the building.
Growth costs something. Design that out and you haven't built a better service, you've built a team that's never had to do anything hard.