Good Friction Creates Traction
- Written January 4, 2024
There are two kinds of friction in user experience.
Bad friction is when an app annoys you by violating your mental model, or when jank, cheapness, and neglect create a distracting or frustrating work environment.
Good friction is just enough slowness that you’re not permitted to get too far ahead of yourself. It’s when the resistance of the inputs complements the rhythm and complexity of the mental work you're trying to do.1
You invite friction when you notice you’re confused and take your hands off the keyboard to write out your thoughts out by hand. You feel the texture of the paper and the time it takes to draw each letter. Writing by hand engages more of your body, so your mind has more time to devote to each word. As soon as your mind has caught to your hand, you go back to your keyboard and type 50 words per minute.
Every task has a proper amount of friction, according to the complexity, the moment, the individual, and the weightiness or risk of the work.2
Footnotes
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Describing this reminds me of requesting that an LLM “explain its thinking” beforehand, or “work step by step”, in order to spend more computational power on the eventual result. I don’t think it’s analogous in detail, but it might create a similar effect. ↩
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In the case of the US nuclear codes, there’s a lot of good friction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Codes. Don’t miss Roger Fisher’s suggestion on how to add even more. ↩