Week 4 on Thai checkout fractures was the first time our squad admitted PromptPay was a temporal problem, not a “trust badge” problem. I still quote Araya’s sampling rule in stand-up.
Flagship program
Friction Cartography
Eleven weeks from raw replay to a one-page atlas. Taught in English from Bangkok, with a remote seat for people who cannot cross town on studio nights.
Tuition is informational only: ฿48,900 for Friction Studio, VAT extra where Thai law requires it. Seats are invoiced after enquiry. This page does not take payment.
Outcomes
You will leave able to do these things without faculty in the room.
- Write a Socket ticket: surface, signal, sample, suspected cause, cost-to-fix, owner.
- Sample session recordings without hunting only for rage clicks.
- Separate cognitive, motor, temporal, trust, and recovery fractures using the Atlas families.
- Challenge a funnel that looks healthy while people are still ringing support.
- Brief a mixed room that includes legal or performance marketing.
- Name at least one limitation in your own evidence instead of hiding it.
Modules
Week by week
- 01
The Socket lexicon
Friction vs failure vs delay. Why “drop-off” is not yet a finding.
- 02
Instrumentation without vanity
Event design, consent notes, and what we refuse to count as evidence.
- 03
Session reading as a craft
Sampling windows, timestamp discipline, and reproducing a classmate’s ticket.
- 04
Funnel fractures in Thai commerce and banking
PromptPay handoffs, OTP loops, address formats, and “complete” screens that still fail the person.
- 05
Microcopy as a friction surface
Labels, helper text, and legal freeze treated as design constraints.
- 06
Rage, dead, and hesitation signals
When a noisy signal is useful, and when it is theatre.
- 07
Building a product atlas
Families, owners, and a one-page artefact stakeholders can mark up.
- 08
Prioritisation
Drop-off mass against cost-to-fix. What we do when both numbers are guesses.
- 09
Briefings that survive the room
Legal, growth, and engineering in one hour without sliding into taste arguments.
- 10
Live product audit
A consented flow, two faculty, public critique.
- 11
Capstone review
Your atlas, an ops reviewer, and a written limitation you are willing to read aloud.
Instructor
Araya Phongphanit
Practice lead. Former research manager at a Bangkok digital bank. Araya built the first Socket ticket format after watching growth and legal talk past each other for a year. She still marks sampling notes by hand.
Guest ops critique in week 11 is usually led by Chaiwat Mekara, session-reading faculty.
Notes from students
I wanted more hours on quantitative instrumentation; week 2 felt compressed. The session labs still paid off, and I would take the studio again if the instrumentation week grew.
Questions
Before you enquire
Do I need to already use a session-replay vendor?
No. We teach sampling on anonymised class recordings first. If your company forbids replay tools, say so in the enquiry; the Atlas still works on support transcripts and time-to-complete distributions, but you will feel the gap in weeks 3 and 6.
Is the remote seat equal to the Bangkok room?
Almost. You hear the same critique. You miss the table-side markup. Week 10’s live audit is harder on a laptop speaker. We do not pretend otherwise.
What is a real limitation of this program?
Friction Cartography will not make a hostile stakeholder suddenly love research. If your organisation punishes named problems, the capstone brief can create risk for the person who presents it. We discuss that in week 9 and we will not coach you to hide a finding to stay safe. That is a limitation of the school’s stance, not a bug in the syllabus.
How is tuition paid?
By invoice after the desk confirms a seat. There is no checkout on this website. See Tuition and the Refund Policy.