“Frictionless” as an alternative to “simplicity” in design
by petermeOn a client project, we were trying to articulate a set of high-level principles to explain desired media experiences. One of the first ones we came up with was “simplicity”, but realized that it was insufficient.
One of the challenges is that “simplicity” has become overloaded, and as Don Norman pointed out, when he wrote “Simplicity is Not the Answer,” the desire for simplicity is often simply a desire for lessening frustration.
We realized that when were describing people’s desired media experiences, we often used the word “frictionless.” It was meant to evoke an “it just works” sentiment. While akin to simplicity, it is different. For example, Kindle is a surprisingly frictionless device — no wires, you ask for a book and get it in less than a minute. The Kindle experience, however, is not simple — there are hundreds of thousands of books to choose from, there is serious power in the reading experience.
When it comes to media, friction is often a result of technical barriers and constraints — the spaghetti of wires that connect televisions to DVRs, DVD players, set-top boxes, game consoles, or the challenge of getting media from one device to another, wireless connectivity getting interrupted. I think about my recent experiences with the Flip Ultra HD Camera. It’s dumb simple — press a button and it records, press it again and it stops. But I found immense friction, either due to massive file sizes, which took forever to copy or process, or due to startlingly low battery life, which required frequent replacement.
This is not to discount the importance of simplicity. In contradiction to Don’s claim, we witnessed that, at least in the realm of media experiences, people desired simplicity, and increasingly favored solutions that were simpler. Whereas friction was about barriers and constraints, we saw simplicity as being about cognitive load. Simple things don’t require a lot of thought. Choices are eliminated, recall is not required.
I’d love to hear how others have handled this, and if anyone has developed a language or taxonomy to help make critical conversations more meaningful.
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July 22nd, 2010 at 2:33 am
Hi Peter,
I always like the Adaptive Path’s posts and have been reading them since I found you through HBR.
I deal a lot with customer centric service design and the customer experience.The idea of frictionless design resonates completely with what I see companies struggle with on a day to day basis. Companies often try to create a memorable customer experience by overloading their touchpoints with remarkability and shareability in the hope that something catches on and creates a brand evangelist. This is confusing and annoying.
To create a great customer experience is to create a frictionless experience with one or two “Aha! I need to tell one of my friends this because this is so awesome.” moments. The simplicity, no wait…..frictionlessness (did I just create a word) of the touchpoints around the remarkeable and shareable touchpoints creates the space for the customer to fully immerse themselves into the experience.
Thanks for giving me “frictionless”, it’s awesome.
July 22nd, 2010 at 5:31 am
Hi Peter!
I know exactly what you’re talking about – ‘simplicity’ seems too vague to describe an easy interaction or pleasant experience…For me, ‘frictionelss’ conjures the word ‘smooth’ which makes me think of flow theory as described by the resolutely unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
So, ‘it has a good flow to it’ seems to work for me.
July 22nd, 2010 at 8:53 am
Good point, yet keep in mind that not all friction is bad: Stopping points where the user is asked to make a decision can be intensely satisfying if:
1. They understand the question.
2. They have a ready answer, a clear choice.
3. They know how to provide the answer quickly and efficiently.
4. They get a huge boost in usefulness of the system after answering that question.
Where you have to ask the user, try to ask only easy, useful, insightful questions.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:58 pm
@Antoine Valet–
Thank you for raising that point. I think that’s another interesting thing about frictionless vs simplicity. While simplicity is pretty much a universal goal, frictionless is not. In our media research, we saw that people sometimes welcomed friction, because it meant that they wouldn’t succumb to media — if things were frictionless, they feared they’d be couch potatoes.
July 22nd, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Effortless. That’s how I describe it. The device can be “complicated” – my favorite camera is, because it can be customized to suit my needs – but it is effortless (and joyful) to use. Taking pictures is effortless and allows me to focus on the image, not the device. Now, photography post processing applications like Lightroom, not so effortless…
July 23rd, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Simplicity to me equates to “meets expectations” and I think its easier for it to be universally applicable to all experiences when you apply it at a very granular interface level. I saw Don Norman speak at the Wharton UI conference this week and he used an aircraft cockpit as an example of “when you don’t want simple” (this has actually been one of my favorite examples of this over the years too), however, when you look at each control or display in isolation – they’d better be simple and not require a lot of effort to understand or use!
July 24th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
I’m glad to hear that I’m not alone in my continuing efforts to articulate the principal and application of “simplicity” in design. It’s like trying to explain the principal of consistency. Without some rules and exceptions, most miss the point, which is never really _absolute_ consistency, or simplicity. I use the term “apparent simplicity,” which–as Miles so usefully mentioned–relates to Flow. But flow, as Mihaly C. himself defines it, “flow” is usually only achieved through accumulated experience. I.e. professionalism. Not always ideal for service launch. The principal of balance trumps simplicity alone, because, as your research seem to me to imply, Peter, equilibrium between simplicity and control–a desire to be the primary actor–is over arching the goal. So, I’d say we’re talking about an optimal simplicity:control ratio. Where to place the fulcrum?: Depends on target audience, thus strategy, I’d say.
July 24th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Speaking of control vs. simplicity, I wish I could edit my previous comment.
July 27th, 2010 at 7:29 am
Oh! this is good. Well, I am interning at a Bio med company now. When my supervisor and I knew that the simple the better, conveying this became an issue, because when you work in a product based company there are other people who would get mad if asked to make changes just to make things simple for the user – like the product design, mech engineers, electrical engineers, software developers etc. Simplicity here only refers to what the user would experience, but in the real world I had to actually use direct examples. In our case, it was more like drawing parallels to defining simplicity and moving away from demanding attention. Again, resonating with being contextual, in a diagnostic lab environment, lab techs are so worked up that they actually need something that is simple enough to just turn the instrument on and trust that this would not get needy for attention; because then they can look into other tasks. Simplicity for us has become necessary – to provide an experience that does not demand frequent unnecessary attention.
Also, using real world examples made a real big difference. When we understand the underlying core for what defines our simple design, in our case – not demanding frequent attention from the lab techs – a simple example like why sometimes people prefer cats to dogs as pets – no offence to dog-lovers. I LOOVE dogs. But, when you really think about it, dogs are like children, they demand attention, but cats dont really care. So, when our focus is to design something that will not demand attention all the time is what would make our experience peaceful and great – again this is context-dependent. I am talking about medical instruments here.
So, I guess, defining simplicity is contextual and needs in-situ focus. Rather than just defining simplicity, it really is differently defined for every different design problem. Simple is complex!
July 27th, 2010 at 7:38 am
Also, http://lawsofsimplicity.com/category/laws?order=ASC
John Maeda blogs a lot about simplicity in design. I had an oppurtunity to glance through his book – The Laws of Simplicity. He is a computer scientist, graphic designer and a visual artist from MIT’s Media lab. Its a good read. It made a lot of sense to me!
July 29th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
This concept of friction is a very valuable one, and is one that is often not considered in the experience design process. I see that it has happened “organically” just by systematically following a process, but not always intentionally.
However, I don’t see friction as an alternative to simplicity; they are mutually exclusive. Simplicity can end up adding friction in some circumstances, and reducing friction can sometimes lead to confusion in a system. I see simplicity and friction as two-thirds of a triad of factors that impact experience systems, the third of which is consistency. And ideal balance needs to be found that allows for achieving what needs to be achieved at any particular point in a given process.
August 9th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
I guess if we unite “simplicity” with “frictionless” (and even “seamless”) we will then be pursuing what Raskin (an author I love for his accurate views) talks when he says (and I paraphrase) “users want to do something, not handle software”.
It seems to me it is both combined that might eventually generate an optimal experience: just enough buttons and lack of connection complexity will make my life easier, as I’ll be able to record that show faster, easier, and most important, not spending time on tasks that are not about recording the show.