Forbes: “…Google is an early case study in my book Friction, where I show how they focused on minimizing user effort. Their home page was essentially white space with a search box in the middle—no confusion or distraction. This focus on the user’s intent stood in stark contrast to their competition. The big difference, though, was in the quality of Google’s results. Their PageRank algorithm created a map of the Web as a giant recommendation engine. On competing search engines, a user might go through pages of results, clicking on many links, before finding what they wanted. With Google, the desired result was likely the top one, or at least in the top few…”