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If there’s one common goal that most of the tech industry always shares and works toward, it’s to deliver without friction experience. Big Tech’s relentless quest to eliminate friction—a term, design-speak, reserved for any obstacle that acts as an extra step users must pass to access a service—has made modern technology easier than ever to use. Giants like Apple, Amazon and Uber have transformed their sectors and made billions just by reducing the effort required to shop or hail a taxi.
Consider the simple act of pulling out your phone to post on Facebook. You don’t need to enter a passcode because your phone probably unlocks itself with your fingerprint or face. The Facebook app is on your home screen. You are already connected and logged in. Within seconds of tapping the icon, your post is ready, and soon you’re replying to comments, checking how many people have liked or shared, and so on.
While this rigorous obsession with simplification was necessary when companies were looking to upgrade from the age of dial-up Internet and flip phones, it has now strayed into easy territory and failed to address the seismic shifts that have altered society’s relationship to technology in the past. several years. The war on friction has led to consequences that even a much younger Mark Zuckerberg, who a decade ago promised at Facebook’s annual developer conference to deliver “real-time randomness in a frictionless experience,” would not have predicted.
Why deadly simple technology has complicated life
To reduce friction means to hide the complexity behind the action. Years ago, this just meant coming up with more convenient ways to do a cumbersome job like making a restaurant reservation. This means hiding what the technology platforms are really capable of and the extent of the power they wield. And that has spawned some of the biggest problems facing the tech industry today.
Designers use conflicts to influence – or in some cases manipulate – how we use their services.
Social media has made it possible to broadcast on the platform — which hosts almost a third of the world’s population — in a few clicks. There is nothing inherently problematic about this, but many large platforms tend to promote the posts that attract the most engagement and attention, which has allowed malicious actors to dominate the attention of millions of people with intentionally divisive posts. You’ll be notified of an update as soon as it arrives, and you’ll be shown a piece of online content as soon as it starts to gain traction—regardless of whether or not it’s been moderated.
Similarly, Amazon’s one-button shopping experience has exacerbated the world’s climate problems. YouTube’s autoplay feature, which plays another video as soon as you finish watching the current one — often sends viewers down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and other disturbing channels.
Which begs the question: Can reintroducing friction into technology solve some of its biggest problems?
How friction controls your online behavior
Friction plays a key role in shaping our choices online. Designers often use it to influence – or in some cases manipulate – how we use their services.
Services that make money by keeping you engaged tend to be completely frictionless so you’d have to put in as little effort as possible to use their apps. like TikTok’s endless stream of autoplay videos.
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Ads, for example, are also a form of friction. If a company wants you to pay for a premium subscription, they will make the free version less convenient by including ads. When YouTube released its Premium tier, it started showing users two ads back-to-back, instead of one, before videos. If you want to eliminate that friction, you have to upgrade.
You will also find much less trouble accessing the elements that companies want to push. Sending a tweet takes seconds, but reporting a tweet for abuse? You’ll have to jump through a few hoops for that.
Similarly, Google doesn’t want you to limit how much of your data its services can access. So for years its privacy settings remained a convoluted mess that most people found difficult to understand. Only recently, after several controversies and lawsuits, have Google and other tech companies streamlined their security controls.
Friction as a force for good
Studies have concluded that intentionally designing friction into technology can enable more thoughtful interactions and allow people to pause and take a moment to understand the broader consequences of their online decisions.
In a research paper, Ulrik Söderström and Thomas Mejtoft, associate professors of Media Technology at Sweden’s Umea University, found that app designs that offer more context about how they work leave users three times more satisfied.
“Slowing down interactions and adding friction in certain situations … creates conscious interactions.”
Söderström and Mejtoft argue that the absence of friction and the rise of overly “user-friendly” services “has led to the creation of dark patterns” such as how Facebook and Twitter’s own algorithms often end up promoting harmful content and misinformation.
“Slowing down interactions and adding friction in certain situations, to help the user understand what’s going on and help them think about the decisions they make, creates conscious interactions,” they told Digital Trends.
Cliff Kuang, UX designer and author of “User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design are Remaking the Way We Live, Work, and Play,” claims that things have become so simple now that the products we use have become “black boxes.” “
When we hide the assumptions and complex calculations that drive these technology platforms under soothing buttons and animations, we also lose the ability to question and rebuild them. For example, one of the more alarming problems that companies struggle with is racial bias in their personalization mechanisms, and even after years they have barely made any progress because these qualities are so deeply ingrained in their technology that it is impossible for them to challenge them without dismantling the products themselves. that made them successful.
By designing for immediate gratification, Kuang adds, technology design prioritizes what people might want in the short term and overlooks long-term effects. “These two things are constantly in conflict, sometimes with dire consequences.”
The future is slow
Instead of instantly directing almost everything people post to their vast networks, what if tech companies added algorithmic speed bumps that give them a chance to spot problematic content before it goes viral?
It could work, according to Anna Cox, a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of London, who suggested that adding friction or “micro-boundaries” to the technology could put an end to meaningless interactions. But she still doubts companies will ever take such a bold step.
“More time to think about whether information should be shared is likely to lead to higher quality data being shared (because you wouldn’t release garbage),” she told Digital Trends. “But of course, that’s pretty much at odds with the way these platforms currently work — they share first and then check things later if there are problems.”
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Fortunately, a few tech companies may have already figured this out to some extent. Earlier this year, Facebook rolled out an update that issues a warning whenever someone tries to share an outdated article. Twitter also added a prompt that prompts users to open a link before retweeting it. WhatsApp introduced a forwarding limit to tackle misinformation and claimed that it led to a 25% drop in message forwarding globally.
While these small changes may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, they are a promising step in the right direction. Twitter found that 33% more people now read articles before sharing, and the extra friction (in the form of a pop-up) managed to convince 40% more people to open the link they were trying to retweet.
Alex Muench, a product designer at Doist, the startup behind the popular productivity and to-do app Todoist, sees these initiatives as “very effective” because they show that companies are willing and able to “adapt to current events.”
“I believe this is the next frontier for design—design for friction.”
“If preventing these problems means increasing friction, I think that’s a good idea in this context,” he said in an email to Digital Trends. “Here, friction should be used as a tool to encourage users to be more aware of possible misinformation and to remind them not to be too reckless with the information they consume or spread.”
(Deliberately) bumpy road ahead
Doing things the hard way could also be the key to digital well-being. Despite YouTube’s aggressive strategy to get me to pay for its Premium plan, I mostly refused to succumb simply because I find those ads — that extra layer of friction — to be enough of a deterrent to remind me that I shouldn’t binge-watch cat videos in the middle of the workday. .
Cox believes that slowing down our interactions through friction can give us enough time to “reflect on whether our behavior aligns with our values” and regain control instead of mindlessly interacting with technology and switching from one app to another.
Friction, however, is a tricky line to tread, and its effectiveness in these areas will depend on how well it is implemented and whether companies do it ethically. Even so, experts believe that friction must be brought back into technology design to tackle a growing number of issues such as the diminishing value of digital well-being, as well as the spread of misinformation, targeted abuse, and more.
“I believe this is the next frontier for design—designing for friction,” said Steve Selzer, head of design at Bungalow, who in an essay four years ago urged designers to design friction back into their products to bring back moments for serendipity and self. -reflection.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn