Author: Kevin Roose / Source: New York Times
Corey Brickley
Seven years ago, a younger and more carefree Mark Zuckerberg went onstage at Facebook’s annual developer conference and announced a major change to the social network’s design.
Until then, apps connected to Facebook would regularly ask users if they wanted to publish their latest activity to their feed on the social network.
Those pop-up messages — from apps like Spotify, Netflix and The Washington Post — were annoying, Mr. Zuckerberg said, so the company had created a new category of apps that could post directly to users’ feeds, without asking for permission every time.“From here on out, it’s a frictionless experience,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Of all the buzzwords in tech, perhaps none has been deployed with as much philosophical conviction as “frictionless.” Over the past decade or so, eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult or time-consuming to use — has become an obsession of the tech industry, accepted as gospel by many of the world’s largest companies.
Airbnb, Uber and hundreds of other start-ups have made billions of dollars by reducing the effort needed to rent rooms, hail taxis and complete other annoying tasks. And when a company fails, excessive friction is often cited as the reason.
“If you’re making the customer do any extra amount of work, no matter what industry you call home, you’re now a target for disruption,” Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud storage company Box, wrote in a 2012 essay.
There is nothing wrong with making things easier, in most cases, and the history of technology is filled with examples of amazing advances brought about by reducing complexity.
Not even the most hardened Luddite, I suspect, wants to go back to the days of horse-drawn carriages and hand-crank radios.But it’s worth asking: Could some of our biggest technological challenges be solved by making things slightly less simple?
After all, the frictionless design of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences, has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence abroad. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content.
And many major security breaches, like the one that recently exposed the data of as many as 500 million Marriott guests, might have been more easily contained if these systems had been more compartmentalized and less tailored for seamless operation.
“The internet’s lack of friction made it great, but now our devotion to minimizing friction is perhaps the internet’s weakest link for security,” Justin Kosslyn, a product manager at Jigsaw, a part of Alphabet that focuses on digital security, wrote last month in an essay for the technology site Motherboard.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve spoken to more than a dozen designers, product managers and tech executives about the principles of frictionless design. Many said that while making products easier to use was usually good, there were cases where friction could be useful in preventing harm, and steering users toward healthier behavior.
Bobby Goodlatte, a former Facebook designer who is now an angel investor, told me that the tech industry’s culture of optimization “presumes that reducing friction is virtuous unto itself.”
“It leads us to ask, ‘Can…
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