The Dangers of Frictionless Design
I have a confession to make: I am addicted to continuous scroll. I fall into some sort of trance once I start to flick my finger upwards and the colourful content captures me. The attention economy has slid many of us into feeds of content that never end, but this is part of a much bigger trend — one that makes it hard to disconnect, by design.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…the subscriptions that autorenew, checkout flows that remember everything about you, streaming services that load the next episode before you have even registered that the last one ended. This is frictionless design, an autopilot mode that has been intentionally built into our physical as well as our digital world because, for some years now, the trend has been to eliminate anything that hinders a “user” (that’s us) from engaging with the experience or achieving the desired outcome of the design.
We all experience friction in the moments of pause that come about due to some sort of obstacle or delay. For example, when you stop at a roundabout and check who is approaching and make a considered decision about when to proceed, or when you have to compare options available to you based on your own set of criteria, you are making a conscious, considered and intentional choice. Whereas when friction is removed, you are often nullified into submission, directed to the desired outcome of the designer or just mindlessly engaged with the world.
This essay explores how we went from trying to make things safe and easy to engage with to designing endless experiences that nullify human agency and resulted in an edgeless world saturated by streamlined passive experiences — flat surfaces where buttons used to be, curved edges where aesthetics once were and endless opportunities to streamline into consumption.
What is frictionless design?
In design terms, friction is the moment when a user interacts with something and experiences some sort of (often, but not always, undesirable) feedback, such as confusion, delay, frustration or difficulty. Think about when you can’t figure out how to open a car door because it requires pushing in a seamless section of the door rather than sliding your hand under a door handle, or when you try deleting an online account only to find yourself clicking through many things to get to a page that tells you to call customer service to cancel your subscription. In the car case, this was not intentional friction; instead, this occurs when your brain has an expectation of what should be “open door action” by sliding your hand under something. But since the new design requires a push instead of a pull motion, the change creates a moment of cognitive friction until you are used to the new action. In the case of the cancellation tunnel, you are being intentionally put through a series of laborious steps to create friction so that it is harder for you to stop paying the company. In each case, we, the so-called “users”, are being cognitively messed with because designers figure out how to activate different parts of the human brain to direct people into their desired outcomes.
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For the last two decades or so, friction has been a hot topic in the design world. A key part of “user-centred design” (also called human-centred design), frictionless design has created edgeless, streamlined and optimised experiences that take away much of the feedback in our day-to-day experiences. Be it in perusing online shopping apps or scrolling social media, we are now mindlessly interacting with platforms and products that hijack our brain’s attention and nullify our agency.
What makes friction useful?
Friction is critical in natural systems because it allows for diversity to emerge and for matter to exist in relation to other matter in three dimensional forms. For example, your shoes have tread that creates friction against the ground; without it, you would slip. As we grow up, it’s through difficulty that we learn how to do things, like how a baby will fall many times before they take their first step. We need diversity of experiences and a degree of tension for ourselves to flourish. Take another example, a tree — it gets jostled around by strong winds, making its internal cell structure knot together in resistance to the wind so it can stand strong against external forces. A tree that does not get exposure to the wind will not grow tall and strong. Similarly, a flower will strive for the best sunlight and grow towards it to optimise its photosynthesis process, in nature, everything adapts to the system it is within in order to gain the resources it needs to thrive. So when we design systems for humans that are bland and effortless, what are the long-term costs we are sacrificing for short term efficiencies? Is it that in losing friction we are making more room for anxiety and meaninglessness to take hold?
I have long been skeptical of human-centred design, not just because it centres us humans over all other living things, but because it is also a reductive way of designing for the masses that creates mindless consumption and emotional dependence on big tech. The proponents will signal its virtues or even acknowledge its downsides to further elicit some sort of perception of self-reflection, but then still make attempts to justify the benefits of a world designed entirely for human desire optimisation. We need less human superiority and more intimate knowledge of our relationship to all other living things in order for us to experience meaningfulness. We all now know the benefits of mindfulness, or active presence as opposed to passivity. Mindfulness helps people feel connected to the world. I see that it’s through frictionless design that we create opportunities to be untethered from the actual experience of being alive and this festers anxiety and discontent. The more passive we are, the more disconnected we become.
In creating a frictionless world, we have lost diversity of experiences — we become trees without any resistance to the winds around us. In that, we have given up a lot of individual agency and collective diversity, and now we all lament about the mindless doom-scrolling traps we fall into thanks to these manipulative design tactics creating seamless and passive engagements. Every time we have to encounter feedback as a result of an action, we have the opportunity to make conscious choices about what to do next. When feedback is minimised, so too are the individual choices that are available to us. It feels like progress, like our lives are becoming easier, when in actual fact, we are being pacified and subtly controlled.
Is friction as an add-on the solution?
What would happen if the social media app that I scroll scroll scroll on was designed to allow friction, such as a button that says, “Do you want to continue scrolling?” In the moment of clicking it, I have a split second to make a conscious choice about the next 20 minutes of my life. That seemingly simple intervention moves me from passive to active. I may choose to continue to scroll but the act of doing so will trigger emotions and different thoughts that may alter the way I interact with the app and therefore how much time I spend on it. I have noticed that streaming apps now ask if you are still watching after a certain amount of time spent on the platform. This is a form of friction built into the experience — a moment to force feedback and interaction, which honestly makes me feel a little “judged” by the machine, like it’s saying, “Hey you, do you really need to watch another one of these episodes right now?”
There is now a bit of an anti-passivity trend where people are seeking out ways to intervene in the mindless consumption brought about by these frictionless experiences. New add-on interventions are being created to intentionally add friction, such as apps that restrict the amount of time you can spend on other apps or phone bricks/lockboxes that enable people to create their own rules on how they can interact with their smartphone, and even “dumbphones” are trending. Adding friction back in creates a cognitive disruption that enables the user to make agentised choices about when and how they will interact with their device. This is an intentional agency-building activity, taking back the time that has been hijacked by the so-called power of human-centred design. Maybe we should rename it for what it has become — ”time-stealing design” or “human-manipulating design” methods?
Now we have unsolicited AI overviews when we do a Google search, which scientists have started to show restricts curiosity and critical thinking skills. There is even a concern about short term memory loss via digital dementia. This is another example of where friction — the act of having to read, consider and click to find the desired information of your search — has been removed and replaced with a sanitised pre-determined set of information where everyone is getting the same stuff spoon fed to them, whether they want it or not (FYI: if you type -AI after your search in google, no AI results will appear in the results).
Friction makes the mind active, while frictionless experiences pacify the mind. The natural world loves friction because it enables evolution to slowly unfold and for diversity to flourish. Imagine a world where instead of everything being designed for time efficiency and optimisation, instead we had more clumsy experiences that made us feel more present, alive and connected — a designed world where we are respected as participants, not users. I get that, in some cases, creating frictionless experiences is critical to safety, but friction is, too; that’s why we have roundabouts, stop signs and speed humps on roads. My issue with the pacification that has resulted from removing the edges to life is that we are left with more space for anxiety and disconnection to fester. Friction is part of a positive life experience, and designers should bring it back in. Thankfully, there is an emerging call for frictionless design to be abandoned, human-centered design is losing its cache in general, and more and more creatives are leaning into more-than-human design approaches. Even the people who got famous promoting frictionless are distancing themselves from the outcomes of their actions. Yet still, we will long live the ramifications of this design trend, and the decades of slow-sliding into passive consumption will take its time to unravel in our collective cognition and culture. Just as shoes with no tread will land you on your back, so too will an edgeless digital world sweep the feet of our collective agency from beneath us.
