Five types of design friction and why they’re awesome
Is there a case to be made for designing intentionally inefficient and unintuitive objects? How can friction help a design direct and grab attention, entertain or even demand empathy?
I was recently asked how to design for making impressions and getting noticed. Here at TRY Creative Tech, close to every project we do is designed from the ground up to be noticed. This is of course to be expected from a tech studio so closely intertwined with the world of advertising and communications. But when faced with such a simple question — How do you make an impression — I struggled to come up with a concise answer. To me it’s always been an intuitive process. Just make it cool, right?
I then considered all the things I interact with and don’t notice — a light switch, Wikipedia, a spoon — and realised that what they have in common is their streamlinedness and adherence to modernistic principles of simplicity, elegance, and form following function to a tee. They are neither more nor less than what they need to be. They are precise. They fit perfectly into your life. They are in other words what is traditionally thought of as good design.
We are surrounded by great design that goes unnoticed. So anything straying from these principles will be unexpected, and will therefore get noticed and leave an impression, no matter how minute. In this article I define intentional deviations from this traditional definition of good design to be examples of design friction.
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Friction is rarely seen as a good aspect of design, and yet it is considered an integral part of other disciplines. It’s the atonality of jazz music, or the bitterness of a complex wine. Friction is coolness, and too rarely do we consider its vital role in design. That’s why I decided to outline a few different types of design friction and where they might be useful.
To be absolutely clear, I am far from the first to make the “outrageous” claim that frictional design is sometimes beneficial. Robert Venturi, commonly known as the father of postmodernism, wrote that “less is a bore” in his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Several design thinkers have considered the role of friction in interaction design, and it has been an integral part of the graphic design field for decades. And a note on aesthetics: each one of these will have a bearing on how a product looks and feels. I will try to steer clear of discussing the visceral aspects of friction, because that deserves an article all on its own. Also, this list is nowhere near exhaustive.
With that said:
1. Obfuscation
Myth, Community, Discussion
TRY Creative Tech was in 2020 tasked with communicating some of Norwegian telecom company Telia’s key sustainability data points in their new office spaces. Key performance indicators such as carbon footprint and customer satisfaction ratings.
If we were to approach this task using a modernist mindset, we would try to communicate each figure in as clear a way as possible. Maybe through a series of elegantly humble screens around the office. Or perhaps an app with daily push notifications? We would make sure we adhered to the latest WCAG guidelines in terms of fonts and contrast. Every data point would be clearly indicated and have its specific spot reserved in a strict hierarchy of information. Every employee would know the value of each indicator at all hours of the day.
But they wouldn’t be talking about them.
The problem with communicating things too clearly, is that nothing is left to the imagination. There is no more room for interpretation, and no reason to discuss.
The indicators Telia wanted to display were absolutely worthy of discussion, so we decided to obfuscate the information. The values are abstracted into a procedural tree that is born anew every morning, grows throughout the day, and is memorialised late in the afternoon when it is fully matured. The key indicators decide its height, thickness and fullness, as well as the colours of the leaves. The tree is displayed on a huge 4 x 4 meter screen in the lobby area. Further inside the office, in a separate installation, the indicator values are exposed and the viewer is presented with a grid of historical trees so they can gauge how the values are changing over time.
By decoupling the data points from the visualisation, the tree naturally became a point of discussion amongst employees. It also opened the installation up for interpretation; People assumed the tree contained more data sets than we had actually implemented. Thus the obfuscation of data points contributed to the myth of the Telia Tree, and gave it a greater perceived complexity than what was actually there.
When discussing obfuscation, the designer who jumps to the front of my mind is Hidetaka Miyazaki, designer and director of the Soulsborne series of video games. The games all have different settings, stories and gameplay mechanics. The reason they’re usually mentioned together using a single word is because of just how prominent Miyazaki’s design influence is. The games all share a similar sense of dread and foreboding, but most relevant to this article is just how obtuse they are. The characters all speak in incomplete riddles. Entire sections of the games are locked behind hidden doors. Players are only allowed to communicate with one another through short, vague messages left on the ground.
I think the wild success of the series is in large part thanks to this very obtuseness. Nowhere is the entire lore of the games explicitly stated. Nothing is fully explained. Instead players are left to pick up tiny scraps of information and do their best to piece them together by engaging with one another. And so you have hundreds of YouTubers devoting their entire careers to decoding the games through hour-long mini documentaries, each contributing to the collective myth of the games. Thanks to their obtuseness, you would struggle to find healthier communities than those of the Soulsborne games.
2. Resistance
Restriction, Entertainment, Satisfaction
The Soulsborne games are rarely brought up without mentioning their punishing difficulty, and this article will be no different. The difficulty of the games is often described as masochistic. A single false move can cost players hours of progress. The lowliest starting area enemy will kill the player character in just a few hits. Bosses will seem straight up impossible the first time they’re encountered.
Players will fall into one of two camps: Those who absolutely despise everything about the games to the point of seething rage, and those who fall head over heels in love with them and leave their families to go live in a basement only containing a bucket, a TV and a video game console. The first group of players is easy to empathise with, but what about the rest? Do they simply love suffering? Well, in a way yes. But we all do, when it is served in moderation. Without pain there is no pleasure, just as there is no good without evil. Overcoming a steep challenge can be immensely satisfying, and will trigger a massive dopamine hit if the user is also rewarded for their efforts.
Here’s a fun thought exercise: how would a modernist design a video game? Given that the goal of the game is to win? Here’s my suggestion:
The thought of designing a game becomes absurd when looking at it from this streamlined, friction free perspective. Games are nothing but friction, and it is the game designers job to expertly provide the player with just enough to keep them engaged, without going overboard and turning them off.
Resistance in the context of design friction is making something difficult or impossible to use. Occasionally the designer will want to target specific users, such as children. There are a plethora of gadgets made for the sole purpose of preventing children from opening doors.
Other times, resistance can act as a hint instead of completely blocking use. Modern cars will often nudge the steering wheel ever so slightly if the user is about to leave their lane at an unexpected location. Of course, cars are (at the time of writing) nowhere near smart enough for their predictions to be true most of the time, so the user hardly needs to exert any effort at all in order to ‘confirm’ their decision to leave the lane.
3. Interruption
Confirmation, Concentration
In 2017 a news anchor recited a story of a girl who had asked her family’s Amazon Alexa “can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?”. As the anchor was quoting the little girl, Alexas placed near the viewers’ TV sets were activated, and as a result hundreds of dollhouses were accidentally ordered. Alexa committed to the order without giving the users a chance to confirm their request.
Now unfortunately, this story probably isn’t true, but it serves as a wonderful illustration of what issues Interruptions can help alleviate.
Interruptions are probably one of the more documented forms of friction — at least in terms of interaction design — and can take on a few different forms. The first is the one discussed in the opening paragraph: preventing the user from taking an action until they have explicitly gone out of their way to give a confirmation. Another example would be every time you are prompted to save your work before quitting an application.
Interruption can also mean interrupting a familiar interaction pattern, to force users to leave their state of flow and focus on a specific task. In more academic terms this is known as going from system 1 thinking to system 2 thinking. The terms were originally coined by Stanovich & West in 2000, but popularised in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
System 1 thinking is driving down a freeway. System 2 is parallel parking.
System 1 thinking is reading this article. System 2 is counting the words of this sentence.
System 1 is intuitive. System 2 is conscious.
Popular dating app Hinge made a conscious decision to ditch the now-ubiquitous swiping gesture first popularised by Tinder. Instead they use a button located in the bottom left of the screen. Their reasoning — I assume — was precisely that the swiping gesture provides too little friction. Swiping is intuitive and fun, and therefore encourages the user to make subconscious split-second decisions based on first impressions. The button, on the other hand, is uncomfortable. There are two types of friction at play here. The first is physical inconvenience. With how big phones have gotten, pressing buttons in the corner of the screen without dropping your phone is an uncomfortable action when using only one hand. The other type of friction lies in simply presenting the user with an interaction they aren’t used to, interrupting their intuitive flow-state. This only works thanks to the ubiquity of swiping.
The result is that users spend more time looking at each profile before deciding whether to skip it or not. Hinge made online dating a conscious action through the introduction of an inconvenient button.
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4. Destruction
Meta, Self-referential, Style
What happened in that last paragraph?
How did you react to the apparent mistakes in the text? Did you scroll up and down for a bit? Check the comments to see if there were any explanations? Immediately assume that I was trying to be clever and getting ready to type out an angry reply?
Regardless of how you reacted, chances are you were no longer paying attention to the content of the article, but rather the article itself. The very screen it was written on, the font it was using, the characters, the device that was displaying it, the author who wrote it. Destruction turns the medium into the message. It’s self referential.
When researching for my master’s thesis on the aesthetics of digital imperfections in 2015, I came across a quote that perfectly encapsulates how the degradation of an object forces us to consider the object itself rather than its function. From William Blattner’s book Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Reader’s Guide:
“The practically irrelevant physical properties of the hammer are more salient when the hammer is broken than when it is functioning. It takes me a moment of reflection and searching my mind to remember the color of my hammer (it is brown), because my hammer is in working order and I pay no attention to its color. . . . When my hammer breaks, however, and I just dumbly stare at it, its color becomes more salient to me. Its practically irrelevant physical characteristics become accessible.”
I’m sure you could easily come up with examples from your own life. I remember the last time I had a cracked phone screen. Over the weeks it took before I got it fixed, I memorised the exact contours of every crack. I noticed elegant bevels in the design that I would never have noticed. The phone was present. So aggravatingly present.
How can this type of friction help us as designers?
Although I sort of promised not to discuss aesthetics in this article, it’s very hard to do so when it comes to Destruction, because at least in digital design, it is primarily through aesthetics that it manifests itself. Music videos, games, digital art — they all frequently take inspiration from glitch art to come up with novel expressions.
I must however try to contain myself here. As mentioned, I have written extensively — 135 pages to be exact — on the topic, and this article is already long enough. For those interested, I recommend checking out my full thesis.
5. Studipity
Empathy, Connection, Humour
Studies show that our perceptions of competence and friendliness are inversely related to one another. I.e. the more competent we perceive someone to be, the colder we assume they are, and vice versa. In fact, chances are you are already — subconsciously at least — aware of this, since studies also show that leaders downplay their own competence to appear warmer, while subordinates downplay their warmth to appear more competent.
I would argue that one of the reasons we love dogs and babies, is precisely due to their stupidity. Anyone who is a parent or has owned a dog can attest to this. It’s what makes them so endearing. Their incompetence makes us empathise with them.
The main relevance this type of friction has to us as designers is in designing human-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence. At the time of writing (2022), AI is at a stage of advancement where — although “smart” enough to be useful — it still hasn’t reached the uncanny valley of intelligence, where you aren’t sure whether you’re talking to a machine or human. AIs are still adorably stupid. Watching them trying to start conversations or crack jokes on the SubSimulatorGP2 subreddit (Where only bots are allowed to post) is like watching a monkey trying to operate complex machinery. It’s hilarious and endearing.
Stupidity builds empathy with users, makes products less intimidating and can be a great source of humour and entertainment.
Considerations
A little goes a long way. There is a very fine line between friction and incompetence. A jazz song consisting only of blue notes is hardly distinguishable from a toddler randomly poking at the keys of a piano. Similarly, it’s not like we can completely disregard the more traditional tenets of good design. We need to be considerate in which we bend or even break, lest we end up with plain old bad design.
As I have experienced first hand while writing this article, it’s hard to define exactly where one type of friction ends and another begins. They have considerable overlap. My hope isn’t for this article to be some sort of definitive encyclopedia of design friction, but rather a jumping-off point for further discussion. It’s hopefully a useful reminder that we sometimes need to take a single step backward in order to take two giant steps forward.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts. What are some other types of design friction? Any great examples I missed? And have you intentionally implemented friction in your own work?
Thanks for reading!
