Friction Is a Design Choice

I love to cook. Not in a fancy way, trying to put together sophisticated meals. Maybe on a special occasion, I will prepare a nicer meal with four or five dishes, but daily meals are usually a single dish or just the main protein with an accompaniment.

At home, it is just my wife and me, but once in a while, when family visits, someone always mentions how quickly I can put a meal together. And I used to scratch my head trying to understand why people say that. It’s not that I am trying to cook fast. I never thought I did anything special.

But then I visited my parents and was asked to prepare breakfast. It took me forever.

The difference is my kitchen. I optimized it so I can cook with very little friction. All the seasonings are within arm’s reach of the stove. I can grab the salt while still steering the pan. I have just enough cutlery and kitchen accessories that, by simply opening the drawer, the things I want are right there.

All that I need is never more than two steps away from the stove.

I also mentioned before that I have excellent knives and keep them very sharp, and I posted about a technique from French restaurants called Mise en Place.

So I go to my mom’s kitchen to prepare breakfast, open the fridge and grab the butter. But where are the eggs? Oh, eggs don’t go in that fridge. They go in the other one, outside the kitchen, where they keep produce. OK. I go outside, come back with the eggs and open all the cabinets around the stove, looking for frying pans. Not a single one to be found.

My mom then shows me the frying pans actually stay on top of that fridge outside, not in the kitchen. OK.

I open the drawer closest to the stove and reach for a butter knife. Nope. Aluminum foil, plastic wrappers, napkins. I got a little luckier on the second one. It has utensils, but they are all in a Tupperware-like case with a lid, which you can’t really lift without pulling the drawer all the way out and almost pulling the lid off, so I can’t reach a knife. With both hands on it, fully focused on that activity, I now have a butter knife.

But I also need a chef’s knife for the other ingredients. The third drawer, of course, has a potato masher, a ladle, a few tongs, and all that other fun stuff that causes havoc in any kitchen drawer. So now I am bent over, fighting a stuck drawer, trying to pull the knife without cursing out loud.

And when I finally get the knife, guess what? It is completely dull.

Alright, I finally get all set; I am ready to roll. The eggs are whisked, the onions are chopped, the bacon is laid out. They have a gas stove, so I turn the knob and press the ignition button. Nothing happens. Maybe it is a safety feature. I turn off the gas, press the ignition first and then turn on the gas. Nothing. I troubleshoot for a minute, then call my mom.

Well, the ignition requires power. The stove is connected to power, but a nearby switch turns off the stove plug. So before every meal, someone goes there and turns on the power. Why??

The amount of unnecessary friction is staggering. Even in a perfect scenario, the extra steps take time, and every little unexpected event throws you off the main task. And context switching, even in cooking, is a problem.

All that came to mind in a flash the other day. We went to buy a few things at a nearby store. It is sort of an outlet where they only have the displays. Just like IKEA, you have to write down the part numbers, but instead of picking them yourself, you have to go to a salesperson who will put in the order.

So we looked for someone to get it done. It was our first visit to that store, so the salesman started by putting my name in the system. I watched him do it, and I was horrified. He had to flip between 3 or 4 applications. Not screens. Applications. Of course, he had to ask me to repeat my email address at least a few times, because it had to be entered in different systems, and he had already filled the clipboard buffer by copying my name.

Then he started putting the order. By then, I was no longer shocked. Only amused. He kept flipping back and forth between two applications. The main one required him to click and confirm at least 4 or 5 times for each item he entered.

I am not familiar with the applications he was using, so I can’t tell whether they were built in-house or are off-the-shelf. A few were desktop applications and a few were web-based. But the one thing I can tell you is that if I had to do that process for every sale every day of my life, I would quit.

And if you think entry-level retail sales jobs are high-rotation, this is probably what happens. A lot of people join and leave all the time. And that sales process will take weeks or months to become proficient and productive. So just when people reach the point where the madness becomes muscle memory, they quit.

Whoever designed those apps and processes should be ashamed of themselves. The cumulative waste of resources is enormous. Think of second and third order consequences besides the obvious low productivity on the front line.

There is the cost of training. The cost of people making mistakes because they have to enter the same information multiple times. The cost of customers waiting while the salesperson fights with the software. The cost of managers having to hire and train people more frequently because the job is frustrating. And the cost of all the little workarounds people invent to make the system slightly less painful.

And then there is something much harder to measure: the mental energy consumed by all of this.

That salesperson wasn’t doing anything particularly complicated. He was selling household goods. But instead of focusing on me, the customer, and getting the order right, he spent a significant portion of his attention remembering which application he needed, where to click, what information to enter again, and how many times to confirm something.

The software had become part of the job instead of helping him do it.

I posted about optimizing for happiness the other day, and I think this one goes on the same line. When we develop a user-facing application, we should optimize for ease of use and low friction. We should have less stuff: fewer features, fewer clicks, fewer confirmations. The system should do the heavy lifting. It drives me nuts when a system won’t do something as basic as sorting things alphabetically.

Putting yourself in your user’s shoes should be the first step. How are people going to use this? Not how I think they’ll use it. I had calls with users where, after a few minutes of navigating screens together, we removed far more than we added. Heck, I had calls with users where, after 30 minutes of asking questions and understanding their day-to-day work, they decided they didn’t want a new feature anymore. It would be more noise than signal.

One client complained about a specific process they had to do and told me all the back-and-forth, copy-and-paste and error-prone issues with it. I took it to Grok, had a conversation with it with some special skills loaded and created a prototype, which I presented the next day. I am not exaggerating when I say the client was giggling when I showed it to him.

The kitchen and the software store are the same story. In both cases, nobody set out to create friction. My mom didn’t decide one day that frying pans belong on a fridge in another room, and I doubt any developer deliberately designed a sales flow that requires four applications and a dozen confirmations. Friction accumulates. It seeps in through convenience decisions, workarounds, legacy systems, and features added without anything being taken away. And because it arrives one small step at a time, nobody notices until some poor soul is bent over a stuck drawer, wondering where the knives are.

That’s why the burden has to fall on those of us who build things. Users will adapt, because they have no choice, but adaptation has a price, and it is paid in errors, turnover, and frustration. Removing friction isn’t glamorous work. Nobody gives you a promo for the feature you didn’t build or the confirmation dialog you deleted. But every click you remove gives a little attention back to the person on the other side of the screen. Multiply that by every user, every day, and ease of use becomes a responsibility.

So the next time you ship something, ask the question my kitchen answers every evening: how many steps stand between the person and the pan? If the answer is “too many,” you already know what to do. Get the eggs out of the other fridge. Put the knives back in the drawer by the stove. And for goodness’ sake, keep them sharp.

If your people are fighting your software every day, I can help find the friction and take it out. I work with teams to simplify workflows and automate the repetitive parts, starting with how the work is actually done. Here’s what I offer.