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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

The distance between a large effort and a moderate effort is not very long; from the user's perspective, both things are in the realm of the Hassle.

The chasm between a small required effort and zero effort is vast, from the user's perspective.

Any product person will tell you that. Hitting the right zero-effort target is what separates a runaway success from a tepid reaction.

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> The chasm between a small required effort and zero effort is vast, from the user's perspective.

Wow! I think I have intuitively/subconsciously worked this into some products I have developed but never had it articulated this way. This is very useful. Any books you'd recommend on this topic?

Sorry, can't recommend a good book. My opinions come from interacting with actual product people, and from watching "undercooked", "overpriced", "poorly made", "easy to replicate" things achieve enviable success and wide adoption very quickly: PHP, Docker, Heroku, Dropbox, etc. They all completely removed friction in some narrow but important areas, and this was more important than all their very real shortcomings.

yes, definitely. I find it helpful to think of usability and friction as an inverse square law relation [0]. Small increases in friction (x-axis) cause dramatic drop-off in usability (y-axis) to begin with, then correspondingly less so. Specific user tolerance will vary, but adoption broadly follows a similar path - exponential drop off.

I've never seen any data to back this up in a quantitative sense (though interested if anyone has?). Nevertheless, I've still found it useful as a qualitative rule of thumb in a positive sense: shaving off small edges of friction can have non-linear return in adoption and satisfaction.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

I like the electromagnetic analogy. I could say along these lines that lowering friction is like upgrading from aluminium wires to copper wires, and removing friction is like upgrading to a superconductor. The change becomes qualitative.

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