Frictional Surfaces

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Definition

Surfaces, interfaces, or user experiences that increase the time and space it takes to complete a goal or perform an action. Sometimes these are helpful, as they can slow down the person interacting with them in a useful way.

Where friction comes from

Incompetence. Unintentional. A form was designed in a way that it asks for the same information twice, a menu buries the common action, or a control has no obvious affordance. This is the kind User experience design and thinking exists to remove.

Physics. The material is resistant and is not designed for ease. A latch needs force to open, a heavy door needs a shoulder, a small screw needs a steady hand. Some of this is unavoidable and some of it is a choice about materials and tolerances.

Design. Someone put it there on purpose. In this case, the friction is doing a job. The question is whose job it is.

Deliberate friction

Friction added on purpose falls into two groups, depending on who benefits.

Friction that protects the person. A confirmation dialogue before a destructive action. A safety interlock on a machine that requires two hands, so neither is in the mechanism. A pill bottle cap that has to be pushed and turned. A delay before an email sends. A speed bump. Each costs the person time and buys back a class of error that would have cost more.

The design principle behind these is that the friction should be proportional to the reversibility of the action. Deleting a draft warrants no friction. Deleting an account warrants a great deal.

Friction that protects someone else's interest. Cancellation flows that run to six screens when signup ran to one. Unsubscribe links in eight-point grey. Data export that arrives as a zip file of unlabelled JSON. Account deletion available only by telephone during business hours.

Frictional asymmetry occurs when the effort required to leave substantially exceeds the effort required to join, the difference is not an oversight. Someone measured it. The pattern has a regulatory name now, and the FTC's click-to-cancel rulemaking and the EU's Digital Services Act both address it directly.

Measuring it

Friction is one of the few interface properties that measures cleanly. Count the steps, count the seconds, count the decisions, count the times attention has to move.

The useful comparison is between paired paths rather than any single figure. Signup steps against cancellation steps. Time to enable a setting against time to disable it. Number of clicks to buy against number to return.

Recording both halves and publishing the ratio is more informative than any usability score, because a designer can defend a slow flow and cannot easily defend a flow that is fast in one direction and slow in the other.

Frictionless as a goal

The default assumption in interface work is that friction should be removed everywhere it is found, and that assumption is worth examining rather than inheriting.

Removing friction from a payment removes the pause in which a person would have reconsidered. Removing friction from posting removes the interval in which a person would have re-read what they wrote. Removing friction from a feed removes the natural stopping point at the end of a page. In each case the friction that was removed had been doing something, and its removal was sold as convenience.

The relevant question for any interface is not how much friction it has but where the friction sits and what it is protecting. A surface with no friction anywhere protects nothing.

This is also the point at which frictional surfaces connect to attention. A device that requires an explicit action to check is a device that reports when asked. A device that requires nothing to check is a device that reports continuously, whether or not there is anything to report.

Physical friction

The term is not only metaphorical, and the physical sense is the one design gets least credit for.

Texture tells a hand where it is. A knurled ring, a detent, a raised edge, and a change in surface finish all supply information without a screen and without a lookup. A control that can be found and operated without looking is one whose surface has enough friction to be located by touch.

Glass has almost none. A flat touchscreen offers our fingers no landmarks, which is why operating one requires the eyes, and why moving a function from a physical control to a screen converts a subcortical action into an attentional one. See Low Resolution Indicators and The Design of Everyday Things.

The trade is worth stating precisely: a touchscreen removes friction from manufacturing and from reconfiguration, and adds friction to use. The savings and the cost land on different parties.

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