The Value Of Adding Friction To Software Products
Inspired By “Is Tech Too Easy To Use?”
There is a YouTube video by someone called “The Coding Sloth” currently making the rounds. The video does not take itself very seriously — The Coding Sloth is, or was, an unemployed computer science graduate who wants to do more LeetCode, so the video is of him writing a browser extension to block distracting websites until the user completes a LeetCode question.
A couple thoughts come to mind…
First, the act of writing, publishing, and sharing this browser extension is probably more useful and relevant to a software engineering job than LeetCode. As we speak, he is currently fielding contributions and updating the extension accordingly.
Second — and this is the focus of my post today — though this extension may seem like an obvious case of over-engineering, I think this kind of thing serves a useful purpose.
What my blog post will be:
- Some random thoughts I had on social media, spurred by an anecdote
- Some random thoughts I had on ego depletion/willpower
What my blog post will not be:
- A work of scientific journalism
- An in-depth look at UI/UX
Motivation
A week ago, I received a particularly critical comment on Medium. I have been criticized in the past for some of my tech content, ranging from my misuse of the term “backend” to my inaccurate statement that Python is not compiled; sometimes the criticism is helpful and sometimes it is not. This last post, however, was simply me talking about a Minecraft YouTube video by Ish. I thought the topic was pretty innocuous and non-offensive, and the post itself pretty tame (albeit silly), but someone commented to say that the video had “zilch artistic/historical merit.” He went on to say that it was remarkable he was even prompted to question my existence and pastime, and that this article was distracting him from truly important matters, such as the devastating effects of climate change or the “hollowing out of the planet” by corporations. He went on to conclude that by writing something so stupid and pointless, I had made him lose faith in humanity.
I took a one-week break from checking notifications on Medium, then asked myself a few questions:
- Why is the Medium notification icon so addicting to me?
- Why are social media notification icons so addicting to so many people in general?
- Can I make something to block Medium notifications, so that the icon itself is hidden or perhaps only viewable for one hour every week?
Flavio Copes writes that we can simply disable comments, but I think this is a disservice to any blog reader. Similarly, I think Medium’s blocking feature is excessive. As a blogger, I have the ability to remove any comment on any of my posts, and to block whoever left it. This is a great way to deal with obvious spam bots, but where does it end? If I just blocked anyone who left a comment I disagreed with, then I could quickly turn this from an open forum into a censored one.
The Willpower Argument
Spending a week without checking notifications was hard.
In a video titled “Willpower Is For Losers,” “Today I Learned” argues that when dealing with temptation, it is much more useful to simply remove the temptation entirely than it is to exercise self-control. This works really well as a self-help idea, though the science behind it is somewhat complicated. The crux of his argument is ego depletion, first corroborated by a study in which participants were brought into rooms that either contained cookies, or both cookies and radishes. The radish/cookie group was forbidden from eating the cookies, and both groups were challenged with an impossible puzzle. The group that was free to eat cookies (not resist temptation) attempted to solve the puzzle for twice as long as the radish/cookie group.
“Ego depletion” has since been challenged, and its existence remains controversial, but “Today I Learned” continues his argument by citing a paper called Everyday Temptations, followed by one called “What’s So Great About Self-Control?” The latter states, rather succinctly, that 200 studies have shown that exercising self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent self-control tasks, and that their own study proves that “goal attainment is influenced by experiences of temptations rather than by actively resisting or controlling those temptations.” In other words, it is easier to eliminate a temptation so that self-control is unnecessary than it is to rely on self-control.
tl;dr “What I Learned” is free to keep using his kSafe box, “Coding Sloth” is free to keep using his LeetCode browser extension, and I am free to keep working on a browser extension to hide my Medium notifications and comments.
The Friction Argument
I am not the first person to think that adding more friction to software may be a good thing. This article came out in the NYTimes in 2018, arguing for MORE friction. There are a number of interesting comments, many of which claim that social media apps present too much friction for specific use cases, such as not selling private data.
Another good example of bad friction is when a user tries to disable Facebook. The three steps to do so are here, which then lead to nine additional steps if you use Account Center. If you finally manage to figure out how to disable it by reading through their instructions, or by following this video, you are then required to re-input your password and select one of nine reasons WHY you are disabling Facebook. For multiple reasons it will suggest some alternative, such as logging out of Facebook or first reading a help page to figure out how to better use Facebook. Meta developers could have easily added a single button that said “disable Facebook,” but they did not.
Friction for other use cases, though, can be beneficial. The NYTimes article states:
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.
For all its flaws, they touched on this concept pretty well in the TV series “Super Pumped.” Kalanick, played by JGL, believes that the beauty of Uber is that it feels like magic. You input your credit card number once. You get in a car without having to verify ID. You feel like you magically summoned a car to you to drive you somewhere, with minimal interference, but in reality (of course) you are paying money to do so.
My credit card company website allows me to set up auto-pay, and the default payment option is “minimum payment.” My credit card website does not require me to read a lengthy explanation of what minimum payment is, and why it may not be a good idea to use it. Amazon lets me buy Kindle items with the touch of a button. It does not require me to wait ten minutes to reconsider, or to first check my library website to see if the book is already available for free.
Because tech companies themselves will always have their own motivations, I think there is great benefit to products like the kSafe box, the open source Mac app SelfControl to block distracting websites with a timer (does anyone have a Windows version for me?), and efforts by people like The Coding Sloth.
…or I could just stop checking notifications so often.
Whichever is easier.
