We need to talk about the F word (‘friction’ in enterprise, that is)

Today, everything is frictionless. Whether you’re parking your car, selling your home, hitting the drive-thru or drying your hair, there’s a company promising to save you time and eliminate any hassle you might encounter. Frictionlessness is the final form of the American cult of convenience —the culmination of an ongoing effort to satisfy consumers’ desire for faster, easier and more complete satisfaction. 

In the digital era, frictionlessness is also a growth driver: The easier it becomes to use a product or service, the faster companies can grow their user base and extract value. Frictionless product design, global consent tools, digital wallets and unified logins powered by giants like Facebook and Google let companies expand and sell without making users complete forms, wade through privacy boilerplate or even enter payment details.

It’s easy to see why investors love frictionless. (Try finding a Bay Area pitch deck that doesn’t promise to eliminate friction.) But our fetishization of frictionlessness comes at a price.

A slippery slope

Making things easy was the digital era’s founding promise. In the mid-1990s, I helped build web products that made stock quotes available at the click of a mouse-button. (It beats running inky fingers down newsprint stock-prices in the back of the business pages.) Other dot-com pioneers made it effortless to listen to music, shop, read news, forge relationships and more. 

Since then, mobile devices, unified logins, location services and more have yielded countless “automagical” solutions to our problems. Personalized feeds deliver content without our raising a finger. Smart devices — speakers, cars, sunglasses, refrigerators — weave digital convenience through every aspect of our lives. Now, AI is eliminating more friction: No need to write emails, read messages or think particularly hard about anything at all. 

However, eliminating friction is no guarantee of success. WeWork spectacularly failed to build a frictionless real-estate empire. Amazon spent vast sums on frictionless brick-and-mortar retail. Pre-Trump Zuck flip-flopped on friction as Facebook sought to goose engagement while countering online trolls.

Moreover, eliminating friction has serious societal consequences. Friction helps us pause, think and make better choices. When Robinhood made trading effortless, countless Americans wound up addicted to the rush. Easy online betting drove bankruptcy rates up 30%. More friction might have kept Crowdstrike from bricking the world’s computers; helped rein in extremists on social media; or slowed the spread of opioids. 

Even for individuals, effortlessness isn’t always a net win.  Eliminating friction can mean surrendering agency. Algorithms deliver premasticated content chosen for us, not by us; online retailers select what we “discover” to control what we buy. Frictionlessness infantilizes us; we’re left floating along, like the hoverchair-bound humans of WALL-E, passively ingesting whatever we’re served.

Strategic inconvenience

While it may be easier to get rich shoveling pablum into the receptive mouths of acquiescent consumers, in the long run, companies that treat customers like intelligent, empowered, self-aware people will do better than those that simply rely on their docility.

Steve Jobs understood the seductions of effortlessness — hence his promise that Apple products would “just work.” But at the same time, he understood the power of friction. When asked about the right way to collect customers’ data, he famously said: “Ask them! Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them.” Jobs advocated a Goldilocks approach: Just the right amount of friction to create products that delight and do right by your users.

By striking the right balance, companies can use friction to their advantage. Friction, after all, is another word for feedback — so products that become completely frictionless stop responding to users’ needs. The pursuit of frictionlessness can launch you skywards, but over time you’ll struggle to course-correct. Eventually, gravity will drag you back to earth.

This isn’t hypothetical: Research shows that friction makes many systems — including businesses — smarter and more resilient. A bit of strategic inconvenience can improve market performance, with investors making smarter decisions when they’re forced to slow down and think about trades. The IEX stock exchange feeds trades through a “magic shoebox” containing miles of coiled fiber optic cables, creating a 350-milisecond delay to blunt the impact of high-frequency trading, making markets fairer for everyone.

Cybersecurity teams sometimes require human approval before software auto-installs across their intranet — slowing people down, while making it harder for bad actors to hijack the network. Data privacy rules like the GDPR, meanwhile, add friction in the form of consent and privacy notices — and while too much is counterproductive, a balanced approach leaves consumers better-informed and with more control over their data. 

Start talking about friction

What does this mean for today’s founders? Clearly, we won’t jettison frictionless technologies anytime soon — nor should we. What we should be doing, though, is asking how we can right-size the friction in our products — or even turn friction into a business opportunity.

For technologists, that means asking: What problems are you solving by eliminating friction — and what problems might you create, now or in future, by doing so? Every design choice brings tradeoffs, but balancing risks and rewards to design for the right level of friction enables both rapid growth and long-term sustainability. 

Such an approach could also make it easier to have grown-up conversations about the need to regulate AI and other emerging technologies. Regulations always add friction — but once we accept that some friction can be valuable, we can work collaboratively with policymakers to find the right level of friction to support innovation while protecting and respecting consumers.

The bottom line? Frictionlessness as the Holy Grail for digital products and services has backfired. It’s time for a more nuanced approach — and that starts with accepting that for tech founders and investors, “friction” shouldn’t be a four-letter word. Only by bringing friction back into the conversation can we responsibly build out new technologies with growth potential, but also real staying power.

Jennie Baird is chair of The Ethical Tech Project.