Reducing friction

We’ve been hearing one phrase a lot from our Stacker onboarding calls recently:

“I want to reduce friction…”

What follows this phrase varies massively depending on what the company does but it always relates to sharing data. For example:

• A office stationery company that wants to make the status of orders available to its wholesale clients
• A travel agency who wants to more efficiency collect and manage the data of their trip participants
• A start-up accelerator who wants its members to record their status against their monthly KPIs
• A vacation home rental company that wants the home owners to be able to modify the availability of their homes and see the projected income.

There are always at least two sides in these data sharing scenarios and we see friction that can be reduced on both sides. This post is a run through of how we think about the history of data sharing.

We’ll use the example of a company collecting data.

Generation I. Paper forms

This is as basic as it gets.

For data flowing into a company it might look something like this: An employee in a company designs a form, they print it and make it available in their offices, shops, outlets etc, the customer fills in the form and hands it to the company, the company processes it and fulfils the objective of the form.

The friction for the customer in this scenario is really high.

The friction for the employee in the company is also high, they have to manually process the contents of the form, however there is one silver lining in paper forms: the authoring of the form doesn’t require specialist skills.

Generation II. Digital paper forms

Seemingly a huge jump, the first attempt at digitising a paper form is the same form but not printed out. These PDFs, Excel files, Word templates (to name just a few) are much easier to distribute than actual paper forms.

There is a tendency for reinvention of the wheel with these sort of forms as there aren’t common standards regarding how they should work. Just like their paper equivalents the rules about how to fill in the form must also be painstakingly manually specified and abided by to avoid incomplete forms. There is still significant friction for the customer who must find, download and fill in a document and then send it to the right place at the company.

The company also bears significant friction here, the content that is filled in on the form must still be manually processed and now the authoring of the form requires a more specialist skillset.

Generation III. Survey tools

Survey tools allow the easy creation of web forms to allow data to be collected directly. They are easier to make than either paper forms or digital paper forms and they are fantastically easy to distribute.

Surveys have proliferated due to excellent tools like Survey Monkey and Qualtrics which make gathering data in this way so easy.

They can be filled in with just a couple of taps and the survey can ensure the input is valid by applying validation as the form is completed. The customer friction for completing a survey is really low, they are also straightforward to author.

However for many organizations survey tools have become a case of “be careful what you wish for” as the data collected becomes difficult to know what to do with. Often it sits in its own silo and is cumbersome or requires expensive custom integration to match up to other systems.

Generation IV. Apps

Apps enable direct data sharing whereby access is granted to the right person to the data in the location that data lives in. They can be so much richer than a survey and they can be operationally much more efficient as the data can end up exactly where it needs to be.

Apps are also several orders of magnitude harder to create than a paper forms, digital paper forms or surveys. And that’s because they require a whole bunch of specialist skillsets to create. This makes building apps only viable for the largest use cases where the budgets can stretch to cover this expertise.

At Stacker we see the future of apps as beyond code and believe that by integrating deeply into your existing databases, as we’ve done with Airtable, we can make it so the best method of data sharing also has the least friction.