Sam Gentle.com

Friction

A term I've heard a lot in software development is friction: the things that slow you down or make something more difficult but don't stop you. For example, having to sign up before you can add items to your cart is friction. Nothing's stopping you from signing up, but it just makes everything harder. Similarly, slow page loads are friction, more buttons to press is friction, and waiting for your online shopping to arrive is friction.

I think what makes friction such an important concept is how disproportionately it affects behaviour. Google found that increasing search latency by 400ms decreased the number of searches people made by 0.6%, and had a persistent effect even after the latency went away. The friction trained the users not to search as often! Akamai ran studies on web behaviour showing that 47% of users expected a site to load in two seconds or less, and 40% would abandon a site that took more than three.

And anecdotally, I've noticed my behaviour changes quite drastically depending on fairly minor incidental difficulties. Before purchasing an e-reader I was fairly skeptical that it would make much difference, and at the time I wasn't really reading many books. However, after I bought it I read about one book every week for years afterwards. Clearly the minor difficulty of going to a bookshop or library once in a while was enough to stop me from reading entirely. I've noticed that I also tend to be happy to pay substantially more when I'm buying something online if I can get it sooner.

I suspect all of this is explained fairly well by standard cognitive biases. Every bit of friction increases the time between when you want a thing and when you get it, and perhaps increases the risk that you won't get it at all. It's well-known that we massively discount the value of future rewards, so perhaps just the time increase due to friction is enough to cause radically different behaviour. Alternatively, there may also be a component of risk aversion; people would rather the certainty of a process with fewer and easier steps.

Either way, it seems like there are basically free wins to be made in taking an existing thing that people like and just making it faster and easier by removing incidental difficulty. And, conversely, some interesting applications in taking things that are too easy and adding friction back in.