Friction: the Thing You Are Actually Measuring

Friction is anything between intending to do something and it being done. It is the unit of this subject and it is rarely defined.

The recommendations in “Friction: the Thing You Are Actually Measuring” need visible ownership, review time and a way to show whether the change reduced effort for the affected group. An organisation can use this practical resource to coordinate that implementation work and compare workloads, without treating hours or activity as a complete measure of digital employee experience.

For an independent benchmark, compare this approach with Nielsen Norman Group; the useful test is whether the evidence remains proportionate, accessible and understandable to the people whose work is being measured.

A working definition

Time and effort spent on the mechanics of work rather than on the work.

Measured in waiting, repeating, hunting and working around.

Not in CPU percentage.

The four kinds

Technical: the machine or the application is slow, broken or unavailable.

Process: the steps required exceed what the task needs. Approvals, forms, handoffs.

Informational: the person cannot find what they need, or does not know it exists.

Access: they do not have permission, and getting it takes time.

Telemetry sees the first. The other three produce most of the complaints and almost none of the dashboard.

Why the kinds matter

Each has a different owner.

Technical belongs to IT and is where DEX programmes naturally sit.

Process belongs to whoever designed the process, frequently finance or HR.

Informational belongs to whoever owns the intranet, which in most organisations is nobody.

Access belongs to security.

Which is why DEX programmes that stay inside IT fix a quarter of the problem, and why the ownership note matters.

Finding friction

Ask people what wasted their time last week. Open question, specific period, and it works better than any survey instrument.

Read ticket text rather than ticket categories.

Walk through a common task yourself, timing it. Onboarding is the classic and the findings are reliably uncomfortable.

And look for workarounds, which are the clearest possible signal: a spreadsheet maintained in parallel to a system means the system does not work.

Measuring it

Time from intent to completion for a named task.

Number of steps, systems and handoffs.

Number of waits, and their length.

These are countable without any platform, by walking through the task once.

The cumulative point

Individual frictions are small: four minutes, eight minutes, a day of waiting.

They are dismissed on that basis, individually and correctly.

What matters is the total across a population and a year, and nobody computes that because no single instance looks worth the trouble.

What to check

Can you name the four kinds in your own organisation, with an example of each?

Which of them does your current measurement see?

When did anybody last walk through a common task and time it?

And what workarounds exist that you know about?

The point

Friction has four kinds — technical, process, informational and access.

Telemetry sees the first; the other three produce most of the complaints.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: find the friction cheaply before buying anything, fix what needs no budget first, report the worst tenth rather than the average, and keep the data about systems rather than about people. None requires a better platform, and a programme doing all four changes more than one twice its size.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: the measurable is mistaken for the important. Device health stands in for experience, ticket categories for causes, a composite score for a finding. Each substitution is convenient, each produces confident decisions on thin ground, and each is corrected by going and looking at the thing itself.