Reduce the right friction
During the setup of this register, I knew I wanted a simple interface, to post as seamlessly as possible. But as things got going, I realised I was missing something important.
I originally thought of using Lovable but then decided against it as it costs money and time just to develop, and I wanted to kick off Aspect as soon as possible while I still had the fire and passion. I was also pleased with how Claude had designed the index and didn’t want to risk it looking different when parsed through Lovable.
However, what I didn’t prepare for was how I was to publish. I was ready to use GitHub and that there would be some groundwork necessary to get it running. As the original intent was to publish some learnings and reflections from my private journal, I wanted some friction, to ensure I cleaned up the posts to be ready for publication. This was especially important as it had to be grammatically sound and be written clearly, which I wouldn’t scrutinise as thoroughly when writing for myself.
And so I threw the question to Claude to figure out where to host, how to create new entries, and how to update the index upon publishing. The first solution was simple, a self-hosted workbench powering the database — I would type my entry there, download the entry page and the updated index page, and upload into GitHub manually.
When I was trying to operationalise this, I realised the biggest issues surfaced quite quickly. Firstly, the workbench had to be hosted somewhere on its own, and secondly, I had to have somewhere interim to hold the pages for the download-reupload friction. Technically this would be fine if I processed all these via a desktop, but alas my creativity flows at the weirdest time, and doing it on mobile was extremely tedious and frustrating.
I started planning for the register without considering the actual user journey and the invisible path only surfaced 💡 when I tried to create and update entries. I thought the most important aspect of the project was setting up the hosting and making it go live. The day-to-day experience, seemingly trivial and forgettable, was actually more crucial. It was at this point I realised I had been reducing the wrong friction.
The Angle
The smallest angle difference can make a plane land in a different country altogether.
The smallest point might actually make a whole world of difference.
The requirements that decide comfort — the important constraint that the system had to be flexible enough for me to publish anywhere, anytime — hid in a boring circumstance I did not think to ask about. I focused on the operationalisation but missed out on the UX, the deciding detail that would change the whole outcome.
Therefore, I had to go back to the drawing board and restart again. This time, Eleventy, a static site generator running on GitHub, was used instead and the entries were simplified to Markdown. Instead of downloading and uploading, I only had to draft the entries in an interface that could be hosted together with the index page, then copy the Markdown and paste it in a new .md file and like magic, it would auto-populate the index etc.
While I had to scrap the old interface wholesale and restart, it was a one-time pain that allowed me to get things done seamlessly and efficiently. It was a real lifesaver not having to manually go through many steps and risk doing it wrongly if done on mobile. This was a small personal project, and the implications are not detrimental as it only affects me, but it won’t be the same for an organisational system. For example, if a company’s staff are always on the go, but their references and guides were designed for desktop and not mobile-first, navigating and scrolling would really cause havoc to their operations.
Therefore, it is essential that when removing friction, we do not dismiss the smallest detail, as it could actually cause the biggest problem.