“We have become far too comfortable between our pursuit of an optimal state of being and our dependence on technology as a substitute for the struggles, challenges, interactions and adventures that constitute the human experience. We have given away too much in exchange for that comfort, and the cost is too high. Our comfort must be resisted if we hope to shake off our apathy and create a better world.”
- Joan Westenberg, Friction (2023)
Friction bothers me. But “frictionless” bothers me more.
I cut my teeth as an interaction designer. Interaction design — coined in the 1980s by Bill Moggridge (RIP 2012) and professionalized in 2003 by the IxDA (RIP 2024) — differs from its graphic and industrial siblings by focusing primarily on a system’s digital touchpoints: its UI. We map out a person’s journey through the systems they inhabit, seek out the problematic interactions they have with any services and products along the way, and endeavour to fix them.
Colloquially, those problematic interactions get referred to as points of friction: a turn of phrase that mistakenly implies all friction is bad.
In the late 00s, I reluctantly accepted User Experience (UX) Designer as my title. You don’t pick the wave; the wave picks you.
Experiences are personal, contextual, and seemingly infinite — you cannot design them. A system’s potential can only be refined to encourage positive experiences and discourage negative ones. The experience itself is an exercise left entirely to the user. This is a truth designers of all stripes know far too well.
“Must be easy-to-use” had quickly become the most common software requirement. That ill-defined requirement soon morphed into full-throated cries for “frictionless” experiences. Friction had become Public Enemy No. 1.
Jump cut to today, and we’re surrounded by frictionless-ness. But it has come at a cost: our digital world is fraught with insufficient agency, safety, security and expressivity.
Our obsessive removal of friction began with the purest of intentions.
Most software starts life in a crude and confusing form — tailored to a system’s capabilities or its author’s desires, not the needs of individuals reliant upon it. It enters our world poorly adapted to the human experience, often unusable without specialized instruction.
The 20th century was early days. It was full of bad friction. Disorienting friction.
Disorienting friction creates confusion and interrupts someone's flow. This disorienting friction may only cause mild frustration like a poorly hung door that fails to latch. But, even when slight — like an overgrown tree obscuring a stop sign — it can lead to far more disastrous consequences.
Friction is also often unintentional — accidental. It seeps into software when there is insufficient resourcing, incomplete understanding, poor craftsmanship, or sloppy maintenance.
Points of disorienting friction are always valuable to seek out and eliminate — despite malicious actors employing them in service of dark patterns. Points of accidental friction must always be reassessed through the lens of intention.
Usability efforts have yielded incredible high-integrity improvements to our craft over the past 40 years.
Baseline usability of software shipping in 2024 is light years beyond where it languished in 1984. Systematic removal of disorienting friction has yielded step-changes for accessibility, learnability, internationalization, efficiency, satisfaction, and legibility. We rely upon software to operate in an increasingly infinite combination of modes and contexts, and it adapts to those situations with far greater grace now than at any point previously.
We’ve prioritized sharing best practices, design patterns, component libraries, and secure code implementations backed by robust test harnesses. We’ve sought to ossify the sturdiest of these best practices into multi-platform standards. These are fantastic habits that the industry continues to practice and invest in today.
We figured out how to make things better, faster.
But the work is not yet done. Mistakes have been made.
Remove too much friction and you’re left on a very slippery slope.
We hooked ourselves to a one-click tunnel vision, seeking a world where users need not think. Along the way, we inadvertently weaponized ourselves into a paper-clip maximizer for friction removal.
What else did we remove to make things frictionless? Laws. Fair labor practices. Security. Safety. Rights. Honesty. Voice. Exit.
We forgot that friction can be good. Some friction is helpful. Without helpful friction, thoughtfully placed or preserved, a system becomes fragile and difficult to grasp.
I've started Friction Observer as a place to explore these points of friction in more depth. To seek out the disorienting friction that still remains. To think out loud about what helpful friction might be.
So many novel approaches are emerging in the craft of computing. Ideas that have been simmering for decades are finally finding their moment to mature. The local-first, decentralized web (Dweb) and web3 software movements present a fresh opportunity for us to rethink defaults — perhaps kissing the concept of “universal” defaults goodbye.
Our current moment demands better definitions of wicked-hard problems such as self-custody of digital assets, privacy, identity, authorization, and interoperability. The time is right to dive into worlds of personal computing and community-led software that still feel broadly unexplored.
If any of this resonates with you, I invite you to follow along as I strive to get a grip, and demonstrate that friction ain't always a bad thing.
