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Designing for Friction in Products
I have been thinking about friction in product design, and how underappreciated it is. Namely, that not every interaction needs to be as smooth as possible. While friction to to bad design is of course something we want to avoid, a product that has some carefully designed friction in places can be a conscious choice.
In my first company after academia, we optimized thermostats remotely to save energy. Here, the guiding principle was to be as frictionless as possible - the inhabitants of homes should never have to touch the thermostat yet always feel comfortable (while we found the pockets where that could lead to energy savings). Here, that turned out to be the right guiding principle. Even though there probably are people who always want to play with the thermostat, we wouldn't have had that information anyway. Having a clear direction when developing algorithms is hugely helpful.
Then there was this ad shown on Twitch which showed someone recording a video of their rooms, seemingly in the break of a sportsball game. It meant to show how easy it is to sell your home with that app. Now, I think it's actually a predatory company that wants to harvest the misery of people facing large losses that have to sell their house quickly. But imagine that weren;t the case - would you really feel comfortable selling your house in five minutes? Should a life-altering decision not involve a little more friction to feel right?
Think about the flow and the user experience of using a product you are designing
- where are the points where some friction might be used to make sure the user is make conscious and well-informed decisions?