Channel Physics: Entropy & Friction

O'Reilly Radar has an interesting interview about Facebook redesigns. We've discussed the company-owned website as a marketing channel in this class. Obviously, for a company to do (or change) anything in this channel requires that the company redesign its website. The interview highlights that in addition to the company's objectives, a company's use of this channel must take into account two external forces that one might think of as "entropy" and "friction".

Entropy: In physics, the second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend toward disorganization. Something analogous is at play in the company-owned website channel, insofar as competitors are always upping the ante and starting trends and fads. Therefore, a company's website is always becoming stale and outdated relative to its more recently re-designed peers. The interview mentions this: "site redesigns are [...] also driven by competitive factors; companies think they need to redesign every year or so because all the other companies are doing it and they don't want to risk looking old fashioned." The imperative for the company website marketer is to remain constantly on the watch for external forces making its website seem out-dated.

Friction: while entropy is the fire under the company's ass, pushing it toward frequent redesigns, there is a countervailing force that we can think of as friction. The interviewee uses an apt analogy: "I liken a site redesign to waking up in the morning and finding that someone has moved my toaster and changed all the knobs and slots, so it takes me 10 minutes to figure out how to find and work it." Re: Facebook, specifically, he writes "Anecdotally, I know people who simply stopped using large portions of the site -- and even stopped logging in altogether -- after the last redesign because they couldn't figure out where anything was."

The interviewee gets the moral of the story exactly right. For the company website marketer, "The goal [...] is balancing what they want to accomplish -- in this case, making the site pay off -- with members' willingness to retrain themselves every several months."