Online, participation isn't equal. The landscape is trifurcated. Most people (90%) consume. A minority (1%) create. The rest (9%) interact, modify, update, annotate, comment. These web citizens differ across more dimensions than mere participation, though. They have distinct patterns of engagement, use separate tools, expect specific outcomes, respond to particular incentives, and accept certain tradeoffs. This post explores another key differentiator: the tolerance of friction within a user's experience.
The general wisdom of our bistable, consume-or-create system with respect to friction is simple: minimise it. Friction slows, impedes, degrades, and obstructs. It is bad. It must be defeated via any means.
For consumers, this means every touchpoint in the user journey should be slick and smooth and never, ever invoke end user thought. For creators, the friction that must be minimised is the friction that is demonstrably non-value-generating, which equates to the majority of creator workflows and processes. However, the friction minimisation playbook doesn't work for curators—that pesky 9% of people on the web with a distinct attentional profile that doesn't quite fit in either of the acceptable boxes offered to them within the current paradigm.
Curators engage more deeply than consumers but not as deeply as creators. To curate is to deliberately interact over time, so the consumer experience of designed-for-non-thought doesn't work. In contrast, curation doesn't map to instrumental objectives in the way that creation does. Creation has, for the most part, a point—an implicit or explicit downstream outcome or higher-order effect that is both desirable and conceivably connected to the activities of creatorhood.
Curators are thus a unique group. Their attention is sharp and bright and deployed for its own sake. To a curator, friction is the coarse material that strikes a match to flame. For them, no friction means no fire. But too much friction means no fire, as well. The right amount of friction for curators is not zero. But it's not much more than zero, either.
Consider what happens when a curator saves a succinct reference to an interesting thing. What gets saved is, broadly:
Basic info: core identifying elements of the thing
Metadata: descriptive data about the thing's creation and capture
Contextualising info: general and user-specific data that adds meaning
Technical data: system-level info, item properties and constraints
The non-but-not-much-more-than-zero friction tolerated demands that time and attention and energy shouldn't be spent on trivial elements. The metadata of a saved thing (timestamp, source, user, device) and the technical details (provenance, versioning, attributes, constraints) should be de-frictioned and done invisibly. What matters to the curator is the most basic of info—the thing's name and description—and the context surrounding the item:
Ontology: annotations that describe what the thing fundamentally is
Semantics: annotations that allocate meaning to the thing
Relationships: connections to other things (e.g. items, people or projects)
Actions: intended uses or next steps associated with the thing
Unfortunately, the key piece—the context surrounding things that evoke the interest of curators—is ineffable to systems outside the origin of that interest. Outside the curator themselves. This presents a problem for people and organisations (like us) that take those with curator-like profiles as their primary users. Specifically: one has a non-but-not-much-more-than-zero amount of friction to allocate across a curator's user journey; where should it go?
The simple answer is that it should go to places that help a curator connect to, enliven and diversify the ineffable context of their deliberate interactions with the surrounding world. The more complex answer? Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.
There needs to be structure for curators, but not too much and not delivered in a way that limits possible emergent outcomes—be they unfolding interests or retrospective patterns. There needs to be a meshing of single player elements that interop intelligently with affordances for multiplayer games. Any representation of context should have enough fidelity to encourage affirmative interaction but should also be permissive enough to allow novel stimuli and creative destruction and to prevent collapse towards dogmatic echo chambers.
It is not the easiest of problems, nor is it the hardest but it is, to us, a particularly interesting one that will have significant consequences when solved.
