In the world of technology and its enthusiasts, the word frictionless – literally “without friction” – has been used for some years to summarize the idea according to which the use of a technological product or service should be the simplest, easiest and fastest possible. Eliminating friction means, for example, making an interface more essential, understandable and quick, reducing the steps to register for a site, simplifying searches on a browser or ensuring that even inexperienced people know how to install and use something technological . Journalist Kevin Roose, however, asked himself in the New York Times whether by dint of eliminating friction, technology has not become too easy and therefore less controllable for users.
Roose argues that “over the past decade eliminating friction has become an obsession with the technology sector” and the need to eliminate this friction “has been taken as the gospel by many of the largest companies in the world.” Roose explains that one of the first big moments in the friction challenge was in 2011, when Mark Zuckerberg explained that Facebook would make it easier and more natural to be able to share your activities, and that it would do so by allowing external services to collect and publish information on how much each user ran, what they ate, where they had been or what music they had listened to. Until then, apps were always asking for the user's permission to post information on their Facebook profile. Instead, Zuckerberg said, “From now on, it's going to be a frictionless experience.” The stated purpose was to make things easier for users; the implicit reason was to make users share as much as possible on Facebook.
In recent years, many other companies have made similar choices. Think about the immediacy of Netflix, how the trailers start on their own when choosing what to see and how the episodes start on their own after the previous one ends, assuming you want to see another one. But also think about the ease and speed with which you can call a driver with Uber (when you are abroad), order a pizza with Just Eat, pay with Apple Pay or a contactless card, book a room in Hong Kong on Airbnb. and buy anything on Amazon “with just one click” (or even just by pressing a Dash Button, the gropes to keep around the house to order specific products). An online payment company called Klarna whose motto is smooth payments has released a video to promote itself in which a fish descends from a slide and continues its descent on a very smooth floor.
There's nothing wrong, explains Roose, in making something easier: no one today would complain about cars parking themselves or how easy it is to pay a bill online. But the elimination of friction also leads to privacy and security problems.
YouTube allows for example to automatically view other videos after the one you searched for. The aim is to make users stay on YouTube for longer: the problem is that in some cases you get to see videos with very different content, which can have consequences on people's opinions or be inappropriate for a child. There are also security problems due to the fact that, in the name of fighting friction, our credit card information is stored on many different apps. These are options that make our life easier, because all the steps that ask us to confirm our identity, enter a password or receive a code to use a service represent a friction, a complication. But it is a friction that serves to guarantee our safety.
Roose argues that to solve these problems one should try “to make things a little less simple” rather than trying to make them simpler and simpler. And he explains: «I don't want to create an idyllic version of the often frustrating slowness of the past. There is nothing inherently good about complicated things, and there is still a lot of room to reduce the friction of certain systems, for example in education or financial and medical services. ' But he adds: “There are both practical and philosophical reasons to ask whether certain technologies are less optimized for our convenience. We would not trust a doctor who rated speed as a priority for our safety. Why should we leave it to an app instead? “.
Finally, Roose gives three examples of choices that in the short term would reduce our interaction with certain technologies, but which, according to him, would allow us to make things a little less simple and at the same time safer and more satisfying.
Viral sharing of false information on Facebook could be reduced by introducing algorithms that work like bumps and slow down the sharing, over a certain number of times, of posts of dubious authenticity, before someone has verified them.
Watching a video suggested in autoplay on YouTube, after the end of the one you have chosen, could be transformed into the possibility of choosing between two different videos, to be started with a click.
The use of Twitter to criticize certain users in groups could be moderated by preventing followers from interacting with a profile if they have not previously followed it for a certain number of days.
