For a simpler and more effective design solution, focus on ‘friction’.

What a self-driving car’s radar sees when navigating a city street.

Hypothetically, If we could have any question answered just by thinking it, that would be a frictionless experience. Life would be easier, conducting research would be a trivial activity and the complete nature of questions would change completely. Such is the impact of friction.

Today, however, like primitive savages we derive most of our answers by tapping and swiping on glass screens. The interactions that impede this experience, (no matter how small) are the factors that create friction – from text that’s too small read to the drop of juice that landed on the screen creating literal friction when you try to swipe.

We spend large amounts of time trying to figure out how the pages of a websites are organised, where to find the answers we want, trying to tap on countless buttons and links, opening tabs, waiting patiently for things to load, scanning thousands of words, and trying to work out a correct syntax of words to get Siri or Google Assistant to work. All these little experiences add up and become the background noise of our interaction with a digital product.

Friction isn’t just an isolated aspect of a user experience, it’s a fundamental driving principle. A good user experience demands a user flow that requires the least amount of effort to accomplish – one with the least amount of friction. So naturally, we would want to reduce it as much as possible, wherever we can.

Don’t make me think

Our capacity to think and process information has been stretched thinner than ever in the information age. As a result, both a product’s simplicity and ease of use have a much greater impact on how we value it in within the context of our lives. When interacting with a digital experience, a user at a mental crossroads should know which direction to go with as little thought as possible. Any moment of active thinking will drastically add to the cumulative mental load on the user, ultimately making the experience that much more cumbersome.

While the methods used to reduce mental load depends on a large number of factors such as the target audience, brand awareness, the landscape of the industry in question etc. They are all rooted to the same end goal: reduce friction on the user.

How to reduce the mental load on your user:

• Ensure things are easy to find and access.
  Make the navigation menu easy to discover and interact with.
• Organise things in ways that are easy to understand.
  Use product categorisations that are aligned to the user’s expectations.
• Use clear, concise titles and labels.
  Make titles bold and stand out, and word them carefully to make content understandable at a glance.
• Ensure the user is clear on what every interactive element does.
  Make it obvious what a button does, or where a link goes.
• Ensure the user is not being asked to do too many things at once.
  Avoid bombarding the user with too many different pieces of information at once (for example, promoting a newsletter, USP’s and recommended products on a page designed to encourage customer conversions).

Looking at the bigger picture, it’s also important to understand how technology and data-driven systems can drive more intelligent and accommodating user experiences. It’s no coincidence that today’s most emergent technologies have far-reaching applications in making machines do the thinking for us. Machine learning and AI can provide suggestions, tailor solutions and give us shortcuts to the information we need. In practice, these technologies are fueling entire industries, but are also available in micro-design applications, such as dynamically generated page layouts and predictive searches.

Our digital services automatically tell us where we parked our cars or who a caller might be, simply by parsing the data that surrounds us.

While this space will advance rapidly over the coming decade, the principle behind them will remain the same and be the driving force behind whether an application is appropriate to that context or product. Should you use AR for your app? Should you allow a user to customise their notification settings? Should the navigation menu have 2 levels or 1? The answer lies in whether it helps alleviate or add friction to the user experience.

Don’t make me wait.

When a task takes up more time than it should, it begins to seriously impact the perceived value of the intended goal. If it takes a whole day to do something you truly want, you may start to question whether you wanted to do it in the first place.

Friction arises from both the forced actions that take up our time, as well as the waiting time between actions. These include everything from page load times, time spent filling out long forms, time spent waiting for a call back, down to the milliseconds spent waiting for an animation to finish.

Generally, time is the constant background factor that slowly adds drag to the user’s flow. It is the aspect that slowly drains the user’s patience and goodwill toward a digital experience and the methods of alleviating it can come from either reducing or masking the user’s perception of it.

Reducing

The direct way to lower the friction caused by time is to reduce the time itself. Shorter page loads, a fewer number of required inputs, quicker responses to user queries, and less time required to consume content. Communicating to the user through content is important and while it’s often a difficult decision to remove or marginalise certain parts of the content, always keep in mind that content is only useful if the user is engaged and wanting to consume it. If the book’s too thick, it doesn’t matter how interesting it is, some people won’t even pull it off the shelf.

Masking

The loading animation is one of the simplest and most elegant design solutions to the persistent problem of waiting for things to download. Early web designers discovered that by merely hinting that progress was being made on a lengthy task, users become much less bothered by being forced to wait. Essentially this method reduces the tedious feeling brought on by nothing happening, a feeling that drastically heightens our awareness and perception of time. Even a humble spinning icon is enough to soothe a user into sitting idle for a few seconds longer, giving a sense that the invisible machine is literally turning its gears for the user.