Good Friction

Most engineers learn to play on both sides of friction.

Civil engineers use friction to erect monuments tall enough to reflect the clouds. Then they reduce resistance so the winds that move those clouds do not give residents seasickness at five hundred meters.

Aerospace engineers reduce it when they are burning millions of gallons of fuel, and then harness it to brake from about 40,000 km/h down to a few before splashdown.

In software, it feels lopsided. All friction — every scroll, every click — is treated like an irritant.

On a sunny Saturday morning in London, sitting on an oak bench by a pond with three indifferent ducks, sipping an iced latte and staring into a black screen with almost-white text, I tried to think of examples where we, folks in tech, add friction to help people. I couldn’t. And GDPR cookie banners, 2FA, and banking delays around suspicious transfers do not count.

Friction in software

Product managers, designers, and engineers have spent years sanding down every user flow. From reducing the scroll by a few pixels to bring the buy button above the fold, to autoplaying the next video.

A battle is waged between the frontal cortex trying to process, interrupt, and make a conscious decision, and tech teams trying to make the flow so frictionless that you just do it. Nike would be proud.

But as I sit in the sun, slightly nudging myself to the left every hour to strike the right balance between sun and shade, and compare this feeling with what I get out of all the near-frictionless products in my life, none come close to this moment. This moment has so many points of friction. The occasional bugs that venture from the pond, trying to sip my latte, that need shooing away. The bench that has no lumbar support. The pollen that makes me sneeze every now and then.

This is not nostalgia for inconvenience. It is a question of whether we have become too quick to call every pause a problem.

Friction in creation

Walks in generative AI. Into every orifice.

What happens to a world where digital production grows by orders of magnitude? Where thoughts become real before they have finished forming? Where you no longer need to ask whether something is worth doing, or whether it is good, because you can just “ship it” and see how it “performs”? Reflection feels optional.

I see three things happening. All in parallel.

We want to consume faster. We try to. But we keep running into the immovable constraints of time and biology: 24 hours in a day, and we can’t really increase our pace of reading, listening, or watching.

So now all apps have controls to 2x the content speed. Written words from books are spoken so we can listen to them while we cook. Browsers have one-click summarisation options.

Strangely, almost no one seems to question whether this acceleration does what it promises, apart from a few researchers.

We produce faster. More apps, more features, more content. Claude has gone from a proper noun to a verb, faster than autocorrect software updates. As I wrote this, my machine kept trying to capitalise the ‘c’. The days of debates, of taking problems to the shower, feel newly endangered.

We flee back to slowness. More analogue. Less friction means we reach saturation faster. A tight hug from a friend, or a palm-reddening high five from your climbing buddy, comes wrapped in friction: taking the tube, driving a few miles, signing a waiver before entering the climbing gym. These feel different from communications that have been reduced to a loop of shares and double taps.

As more of life becomes mediated by 0s and 1s, some people begin to crave the tangible again. Every now and then, I read a headline stating that Gen Z is spending more time IRL. And the next post is about double-digit growth of TikTok. The juxtaposition.

At this point, I got up and moved to the other side of the bench to keep up with the sun. Now facing the park and seeing cyclists zoom by, their bright vests making me look up.

Friction for happiness, creativity and joy

The production and consumption flywheel is being spun faster and faster, and as it accelerates, the less often we are asked to choose deliberately.

One of my favourite restaurants in London is Dishoom. The food is great, but the thing I love most about it is the queuing outside with friends. And no, I don’t just love queuing because I live in Britain. Being good at something and loving something are two different things. But that friction, eased by the serving of chai on a cold London evening while chatting with friends, is beautiful. It literally increases the time spent with friends.

Next-day delivery, same-day delivery, delivery before 6pm. Every desire fulfilled before it has had time to ripen. The pause between wanting and having used to give us time to decide whether the wanting was real. We now get frustrated if the next video buffers, even for a second. Autoplay reduces friction, but it also removes a tiny act of agency: the moment of asking, “Do I want another one?” Each removed pause shortens the distance between dopamine spikes, accelerating the chase to the next one.

I wonder whether some pauses were doing more for us than our dashboards knew how to measure.

When building something, the fact that not everything can be done in one sitting matters. The time spent with the idea brewing in our unconscious as we eat, sleep, and shower, and the different things we experience in between, all form part of the creative process. Getting bored with a problem, a thought, is a feature.

This part of the essay I wrote the following weekend, somewhere over the Atlantic heading towards San Francisco, the birthplace of Claude, which is running in the adjacent window adjusting some UI elements on my to-do app.

For weeks, the thoughts on friction filtered in and out, becoming clearer.

On Saturday I had the privilege of attending my friend Selena’s wedding in our friend Becca’s backyard, in the Bay Area. Their vows brought tears. And there was no LLM used in the writing of those words. You could feel the back and forth, the hours that were spent revisiting memories to stitch together words that moved people. The next afternoon, Selena told us how she wrote the vows, how she rehearsed them, and how she cried every time. It was clear that the process had been part of the joy.

For many, the process of building is what brings joy. Writing an essay, animating an image, building an app, architecting a building: the struggles, dead ends, restarts, and debates all become part of the story of what is made. And the beauty of this is that it compounds. The next thing we do has remnants of the previous struggles. If we outsource this, we risk losing the joy.

Leaving thoughts

This last part I wrote sitting outside Manresa Bread bakery in Downtown Los Gatos, California, tearing small chunks of their jalapeño cheddar monkey bread and sipping an iced latte. Dealing with a different set of pollen. Getting the local Claritin didn’t really help.

In the tech bubble that I am a part of, reducing friction and, in some cases, reducing the work itself seems to be the current gospel. Bots galore, mine talking to yours, not me to you.

The distinction I care about is not friction versus ease. It is agency versus drift.

A little friction can help fight against the fragilities of human nature. It can buy our minds the time they need to catch up. More time before the next video auto-plays. A bot that does not fill every empty slot in our calendars with a task or meeting. Time for il dolce far niente, for sharing jokes with the work bestie, for strolling through the aisles of a bookstore rather than auto-ordering the book I’ll most likely like next.

Perhaps good software engineering does not eliminate friction. It tunes it in our favour.