001 — How to Properly Add Friction to Your Designs (feat. Patrick Cox)
The first event of the Lunch UX reboot was graciously hosted by our friends at Mojo Marketplace downtown SLC. I taught at the kickoff event… and this, is what I taught…
“Santaquin Man Sends Lambo to Tow Yard Hours After Winning It” was the KSL headline December 2011.
David won a $380,000 Lamborghini Murcielago from a Maverick gas station contest titled Joe Schmo to Lambo while attending a college football game in November of 2011. “I couldn’t believe I won it!” The Lamborgini was given to him during the game and he was immediately able to drive it home that same Saturday.
What would be the first thing you would do?
Well, just like all of you would have done, David started giving rides to all his family and friends. But, within six hours of winning the super car he hit some gravel on the side of the road and smashed it up. David and his friend spun out of control and “ended up in a field, and I back-ended a couple of fence posts.”
David’s brand new ride could no longer be driven. Fortunately, for one of the entry requirements for the contest was the winner had to provide proof of insurance to get the keys. The super car was later towed to a body shop in Las Vegas and repaired. Happy ending.
The irony in this story however is that David also won a $5000 driving school pass at the Miller Sports Park to be trained on how to drive such a powerful car properly “Yeah, I got it on Saturday and I wrecked it on Saturday.”
Imagine if Maverick had also required him to use the driving school pass first in order to truly take possession of the keys?
Do Make Me Think
Stories are generally told methodically and thoughtfully if the story teller wants his audience to truly be engaged. As designers, we are told all the time that we should tell stories with our designs and to tell better stories with our workflows and visual treatments we sometimes need to slow our users down to keep them engaged.
It’s been a pretty common and shared attitude that efficiency means speed — time on task. But moving too fast can have disastrous consequences for your users. Poor poor David and that sweet Lambo.
Designing strategic friction in your user flows allows users to be more thoughtful, this leads to better quality, which leads to more confident users, which leads to a more trusted truly efficient product that people will want to use day in and day out.
There are at least three decent sized benefits to adding friction to your designs:
- Prevent users from making mistakes and keep them in control.
- Create power users through constant education.
- Improve retention and adoption by making them try or build things.
How does one add friction to accomplish these things?
Design Exercise: Error Prevention
Problem #1: Canopy. Customer service gets at least one call a week from a user who has accidentally deleted a contact or multiple contacts and cannot recover them in the UI. Sometimes they accidentally delete all of their contacts.
Now it’s your turn.
Take a few minutes to find the problem in the screenshot to the left, sketch or write our some possible solutions and if you’d like share them in a comment below.
Design Exercise: Create Power users
Problem #2: Slack. Users complain that they need new features that already exist in the app, in some cases for months. Also, customer service and the product management team have noticed that new feature adoption is really low.
Now it’s your turn.
Take a few minutes to find the problem in the screenshot to the left, sketch or write our some possible solutions and if you’d like share them in a comment below.
Design Exercise: Build Retention
Problem #3: Tidal. While the on-boarding flow and interaction are very well designed and efficient, customers don’t subscribe afterward. If they do they subscribe they rarely return within a few days and eventually cancel their subscription.
Now it’s your turn.
Take a few minutes to find the problem in the screenshot to the left, sketch or write our some possible solutions and if you’d like share them in a comment below.
Slow Your Users Down
We can design better user stories and experiences if we can properly slow them down when more time and attention is needed to move safely and effectively inside the product.
Speed is not efficiency. Efficiency is control followed by speed. Think Vin Diesel.
Meaningful interactions and experiences should prevent errors, teach users to become power users, build user retention and adoption and make people think.
Later skaters.
