Counter to the authors claim my experience is that friction is an essential building block of literally any organization.

Have a hard time reaching customer service? That is because they added friction to finding the number on purpose. Have to wait in the phone line and go through a maze of electronic voices before being able to talk to a person? Friction. That tax form seems needlessly complicated? Friction.

Friction is an essential design component of any system and some of it's uses are also legitimate.

Sometimes you want the costly action to have a small cost on the user side as well, which will act as a filter for people who really need your help, for example.

Let's say for example you have a self-service platform for students and they should be able to change their name. Now you could do that frictionless, but a name change is not frictionless in the bureaucratic backend of the student office. That means representing it to the user as a simple frictionless process, when it isn't is a misrepresentation of reality. Then it is better to represent it as a thing they can request and have to wait for till it is done.

Ideally of course the student office would have systems where names can be changed 10 times a second with flawless forward- and backwards-compatibility, but that isn't the world we live in.

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sobkas 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Point of friction is to have it as a filter against people who really need your help.

Helping people necessitates taking some action, spending resources, potentially making some errors that can be taken against you.

But on the other hand, refusing to help people without any reason or flimsy reason is also frowned upon.

Adding friction is a perfect solution, now you want to help everyone but this stupid/pesky/lazy people just aren't able to follow simple(they ain't) instructions how to properly follow process of acquiring etc.

Now it's their fault, so no action is needed on you behalf.

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maxweylandt 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Counter to the authors claim my experience is that friction is an essential building block of literally any organization.

I don't read the author as claiming that at all. In fact I came away thinking this was an argument for friction, if anything.

	▲	atoav 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I did not say the author is not advocating for friction, I said the authors wording about the tech world wanting everything to be fictionless is wrong (as I think I demonstrated with my example of customer support). To quote the author: > In tech circles friction is seen as bad, everything needs to be frictionless. Every interaction with anything needs to be smooth and uninterrupted. This is the claim I refuted. This is what the tech circles like to appear like, all while using friction when it comes to their AGBs, when it comes to rejecting their tracking cookies, when it comes to opting out or unsubscribing, you get the idea. Don't want a path to be taken often? Add friction. These are all examples for neferious use of friction, but in itself there is nothing bad about friction. E.g. the "Format" button on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera needs to be hold for three seconds (animating as you hold it). This added friction gives you enough time to reconsider whether you really want to erase all those videos you recorded.