If you want to get people to use your service, get rid of the friction.
This really hit home with me the other week, at an event I attended as part of my work at the Department of Health, which was about the patient of the future.
It struck me that what will make the real transformative change in healthcare (for example) is when people’s access to services, data and indeed connections is entirely frictionless.
Downloading an app is friction. Signing up for an account is friction. Finding a wifi connection is friction.
This is where I think internet of things stuff comes in. When your coffee cup has an internet connection, when lamposts have an internet connection, when wifi is everywhere, friction disappears.
This isn’t so far away. You can already get a coffee cup that measures the calorific contents of what you are drinking. When everyone, everything and everywhere is networked, everything changes.
The friction is replaced, of course, by a bunch of other issues – mostly ethical ones. Another, technical one, is how we handle and what we do with all this data.