When I go for a walk on a beach, I assume I’ll get a bit of sand in my shoes. It’s part of the experience and it doesn’t make me shy away from the water’s edge. We can overdo our concern about making our services so seamless that our researchers experience no friction – no sand in the shoes – and perhaps value them less for being so easy to use.
I’ve touched on service friction before. But this long read on Medium does a great example of explaining why friction – in the product realm – is a good thing. It inspired me to come back to touch on friction in law library services.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about what friction is and what it isn’t. In my mind, if you have poor customer service or if you serve up web- or mobile-based apps with poor interfaces, you have something worse than friction. That’s the difference between getting some sand in your shoe and filling it with cement. Bad customer service is like a closed door, not one that needs a bit of effort to open.
The difficulty with service friction is getting the right balance. When we talk about librarians being disintermediated, we are often describing a library experience that has eliminated most of the friction for the user. It’s why we struggle with the idea that libraries are free when, in fact, they are free-to-you.
When there’s no friction, it can mean that the people receiving the service forget that there is a person delivering it, or paying for it, or customizing it, and so on.
There is a point at which the amount of work it takes to get to the information can cause the researcher to retreat. This is a challenge in public libraries, where they license a variety of electronic media that provide very uneven results. Again, it comes down to balancing: how much of what we provide is unmediated access to information and how much is service, either value added or mediated support? I can license a ton of content – especially if I reduce my staff head count – but that doesn’t necessarily improve the service level. It doesn’t even ensure that the content is going to be used.
The nice thing about a bit of friction, when you’ve got your customer service balance and your overall service delivery balance worked out, is that it can be a bit of a reminder that what we do isn’t magic. It’s like when someone makes your favorite pie – there’s a bit of love in that pie, in addition to all the other ingredients.
These are some friction-creating options that I think work nicely in a law library:
- no free education seminars for lawyers (or people who can make money off the education). Putting a price on something causes people to value it. Charging $5 for a CLE can cause lawyers to show up, where they might have just ghosted a free session that they had registered for.
- exclusive logins. We use EZProxy but I’ve used other DIY options to create a login for members (lawyers and others) at a courthouse library. It doesn’t cost them anything but it reminds them that they are accessing something that they have paid for (membership dues, licensing fees, what have you). This can also be a platform for remote access to resources.
- library cards. I did a whole post on those. They’re an easy way to show you’re part of the in-group, and unlike a lot of library services, they can be physical reminders when the researcher isn’t using the library that they get benefits from it.
There’s no need for us to return to a time when friction might have meant hard-to-use. Nor should you avoid reducing friction even when you think it’s the researcher’s own inability to research that is the problem. But a bit of sand in the shoe can be a reminder that professionals took care to enable the access or provide the service.