We recently came across a new concept called Friction. Friction is making things difficult when they could be done much easier. It’s the obstacles between what you want to do and doing it. Generally, friction is something you want to remove, and a great example of successful friction removal is Amazon. One of the reasons Amazon has been so successful is it’s taken a lot of the friction out of buying stuff. They’ve made shopping pretty much as effortless as it can be.

It made us realise that one of the things we’ve done with VALID is to remove friction from tree risk.

At the risk assessment level, the occupancy and consequence decisions in the App have little friction. The friction that comes with bafflegab (vague words) and numberwang (difficult maths) has been designed out. With a bit of training, occupancy and consequence decisions are pretty much effortless.

On the other hand, when you want assessors to be thoughtful about their decisions you add friction. In the App, you have to go through VALID letter-by-letter before you can make a likelihood of failure decision. This is adding friction where it’s important.