How to create a friction log

[zkamvar]

What is a friction log?

A Friction Log is a narrative record of a series of steps taken for a specific task that additionally gives a record of the emotional reaction from each step. This gives developers a clear indication of what specific part of a task needs attention to give a better user experience.

How to Contribute

If you would like, you can contribute a friction log! The important part is to choose a specific task (see the example below).

Friction logs can be awkward at first because you have to pause to write down your steps, but you eventually get the hang of it. Another way to do a friction log is to buddy up and do a task over zoom and verbally narrate your experience while your zoom partner types the log.

Template

📛 Who’s doing this?    | [YOUR NAME]
----------------------- | ------------------
📅 Date of friction log | [YYYY-MM-DD]
💡 What’s the use case? | [E.G. ADD IMAGE TO WORKBENCH LESSON]
🖥️ OS System            | [MAC, WINDOWS, LINUX] [VERSION]
🌈 Logging key          | (👍🏼): Awesome, easy <br> (🤔): Hmm, bit tricky but getting through it.<br> (🔥): I want to throw my computer out the window

## Steps

 - 👍🏼 
 - 🤔 
 - 🔥 

## Thoughts

Example

When you perform a task on your computer, often you have to go through several steps to perform a task. Let's take an example of a task that is commonly frustrating for many people: sharing Google Slides in a Zoom meeting.

You would do the following steps:

1. Navigate to the slides in your browser
2. Click on the down arrow next to the "Slideshow" button and select "presenter view.
3. Click "share screen" on Zoom
4. Select the window with the slides you want to present from the screen options Zoom gives you.

If someone asked you how you did this task, you might say something like:

• I start by finding the link to my slides from the meeting notes and clicking on it.
• I know I want to present, and I accidentally clicked "Slideshow" button, when I wanted to use presenter view, so I have to hit esc and then select "presenter view" from the dropdown next to the "Slideshow Button"
• I then go to Zoom and click on "Share Screen" and I have to ask the host to enable screen sharing. Once they give the okay, I click on "Share Screen" and a window with a bunch of screen choices pops up.
• I orient myself and pick the window with my slides and then click "share" and then ask everyone "can you see my slides"

You can see that there's a more narrative structure to this second example, which gives some insights about hidden steps that may not have been obvious from the straightforward steps. A friction log is similar to this, but it adds information about your goal and, importantly, your emotional reaction to the steps with a little guide for ranking each step. Let's see what this friction log looks like if we add our emotional state in there:

Example Friction Log

📛 Who’s doing this?	Zhian N. Kamvar
📅 Date of friction log	2022-04-28
💡 What’s the use case?	Share Google Slides on Zoom
🖥️ OS System	Ubuntu Linux 20.04
🌈 Logging key	(👍🏼): Awesome, easy (🤔): Hmm, bit tricky but getting through it. (🔥): I want to throw my computer out the window

Steps

• 👍🏼 I start by finding the link to my slides from the meeting notes and clicking on it.
• 🔥 I know I want to present, and I accidentally clicked "Slideshow" button, when I wanted to use presenter view, so I have to hit esc and then select "presenter view" from the dropdown next to the "Slideshow Button". Ugh, we're two years into online-only meetings, you'd think they'd make presenter notes a priority by now.
• 🤔 I then go to Zoom and click on "Share Screen" and I have to ask the host to enable screen sharing. Once they give the okay, I click on "Share Screen" and a window with a bunch of screen choices pops up.
• 👍🏼 I orient myself and pick the window with my slides and then click "share" and then ask everyone "can you see my slides"

Thoughts

I always know that I want to go to presenter view, but I just hit "start slideshow" because It's literally right there and I regret it every time because the window zooms into focus and I feel like I've lost control of my computer.

---

Now we can look at this task and see immediately that much of the frustration stems from specific features of Google Slides and Zoom, and we can focus our efforts on improving those experiences by either using different tools or providing documentation or reminders.