Over the past century, technology has made exponential improvements in decreasing friction to do certain jobs we need to do throughout our lives. Need to go somewhere? Take a car, plane, Uber, scooter, etc. Need to communicate? Email, text messaging, social media, in seconds, right at your fingertips. Need to find the answer to something? Just Google it, or ask Alexa. The ability to do most things we want is just a couple of clicks or taps away. What does this mean for the world as a whole? Is faster and easier necessarily a net positive thing? I think in the past it has been, but unless we think about building innovative tech on top of this suite of convenience, its benefits will slowly stagnate and inevitably decrease.
If we consider the ability wave to be decreasing friction to do a certain job, I think the next wave of technology needs to focus on the quality of the job being done. At some point we have to ask ourselves, is this piece of technology contributing a significant and genuine improvement in my life? For quite a bit of products in the ability stack, the answer is net neutral or negative. The future of technology will involve extracting true value from our daily jobs so that human-computer interaction will continue to be productive and positive. Society is slowly starting to realize that living a balanced, fulfilling, and successful life involves maximum quality and not necessarily maximum quantity; thus, people will begin to seek products that can provide that improvement.
Interestingly, these “things” that people really want have been constant for thousands of years - a quality mind, a quality body, quality experiences, and quality relationships (among other core principles). However, I think now is the beginning of a paradigm shift for new tech companies to really tackle these deep questions about the true value of a frictionless technology stack, and how we can improve it. There are several examples of successful companies that are visionary in their approach to building parts of this new quality stack.
Travel
Traveling has become easier than ever with online booking agencies like Kayak and Expedia, and trip planning takes a fraction of the time it used to, due to almost unlimited online resources. But how do we ensure that each trip is a high quality experience? People are still uncertain about whether a trip will be successful and if they can find the right experiences to make the trip worth it. Airbnb Experiences is trying to tackle this problem by sourcing and providing unique activities provided by locals to enhance the quality of tourism.
Sleep
Everyone knows to a certain extent that sleep is important, but school/work schedules and screen time has made sleep an afterthought. Eight Sleep is betting on people investing in using tech to create a truly high quality sleeping experience, in turn potentially generating a huge quality of life improvement.
Diet/Nutrition
MyFitnessPal’s popularity has generated a whole host of diet and calorie tracking apps, which has made the ability to log a food diary as easy as ever. However, we have to ask if this approach is truly helping people live healthy lives, or creating unnecessary pressure for a questionably beneficial tracking routine. Noom is trying to solve this. With a more wholistic nutrition philosophy and an ability to interface with nutrition coaches, it teaches people what being healthy truly means.
Meditation
With an unending catalogue of sleep sounds and meditation tracks on the internet, it isn’t very difficult to download and listen to one if needed, but these standalone audio clips are generic and lack much personal value. Headspace is able to make meditation easy by breaking it into 15 minute chunks, assisting you along the way to become an expert meditator, providing personalized guidance as you build the habit. This creates high quality engagement with technology that improves the mind.
Messaging
Communicating with anyone over text takes seconds and is almost second nature to us. There is almost no friction to communicate with a friend. However, as messaging is really a means to the end of fostering quality relationships, is it really providing? Cocoon is trying to develop high quality messaging by focusing on small private groups where people can share deep details about their lives. I wrote about messaging in more detail here.
More to Come
These are just some examples of companies building the beginnings of the quality stack. There are, however, many open problems that are frictionless but low quality.
Search - It’s incredibly easy to find information on the internet, but is this information high quality? Search results lately seem to be a majority of ads or questionable articles.
Dating - Simply swipe right to find the love of your life! How simple can it get? However, these apps are ineffective and generate low quality relationships or personal insecurities. A truly genuine and high quality dating solution has yet to come.
Personal finance - It’s super easy now to open a bank account or invest in stocks. But are these transactions really high quality? Are we helping people feel empowered and secure in their financial life? Are we decreasing knowledge asymmetry with financial knowledge?
Meeting people - In the corporate world, meeting people is extremely difficult and relies on personal networks (slow) or the internet (questionable quality). There seems to be very few ways to meet high quality people on-demand.
I’m sure there are hundreds of such problems but it is interesting to explore the possibilities of a world where more things are built on the quality stack. When we make the interaction with technology truly high quality, it can unlock a mass of untapped happiness and self-improvement. It then seems intuitive that building something successful involves 1) making it frictionless, and, if it is, 2) making it high quality.