The Frictional Effect of Burden on Human Behavior

Consider the following situation:

"You're in a bar with your friends. The moment is perfect, lights and music just right. You spot a person across the bar, they're beautiful. You feel drawn. It's the kind of person you'd like to be with, you don't know why. Your mind imagines you walking to them, getting along and getting their number. You're ready to go but you'd have to remove yourself from the situation with your friends – should you share before or after the fact? Now your mind pictures the other scenario where you approach this beauty and the moment turns awkward. You see yourself walking back to your friends to share your rejection. Starts feeling like too much trouble and you backtrack – why bother? You're already having fun. You try to forget about the whole affair as you shift your attention back to your friends."

Would you have acted differently in this scenario? You might have. Had you approached the beauty, you would be voting with your behavior that the expected benefits of the encounter outweigh any potential trouble. If you held back, you'd be attesting the opposite – that the trouble you anticipate doesn't warrant an approach. Anticipated trouble is another way of thinking about experiential costs. In other words, the felt costs you expected acted as a ‘resistance’ or ‘friction’ of sorts, one you couldn't overcome to put yourself into action.

The hypothetical situation above illustrates the frictional quality of experiential costs. It is because of this breaking quality that people in the design space sometimes refer to experiential costs as  ‘frictions’. It’s not only designers, most people use metaphors to talk about burdensome situations:

After this brief discussion on affect we can formally introduce the concept of experiential costs. An experiential cost is anything that detracts from the experience you are having in the moment, anything that makes the present situation less valuable. In different words, an experiential cost is an experience you appraise as ‘costly’ or ‘burdensome’. The notion may be unfamiliar because people usually talk about these costs using metaphors: You don't tell a friend you are going through an experientially costly situation; instead, you describe it as painful, irritating, uncomfortable, or complicated.)) Essay / The Perception of Burden in Human Experience

To be precise, the observation here is not that experiential costs feel like frictions, but rather that they have a friction-like effect on behavior: When people consider a course of action or experience, their minds weigh and compare the felt costs and rewards they expect to encounter along the way. The verdict reached on the question of whether they consider the course of action worthwhile is observable in the behavior they elicit. If they push forward, they are manifesting that their assessment of value was net positive; if they refrain from pursuing the course of action — by rejecting it or by shelving it for future consideration — they are indicating the opposite. This logic applies equally to decisions on purchases, relationships, movements and every goal that may cross people's minds, either by choice or by duty.

The power of experiential costs to pause behavior only increases when you are enduring them on the flesh. Anticipating burdens is one thing, when you are actually going through pain or trouble it can truly put break on your behavior. Remember experiential costs are felt and feelings are compelling. There’s no helping it, burdensome feelings bring our attention to them. When they are intense enough, they can make us reconsider if the current course of action is worth it, sometimes to the point of convincing us otherwise.

Because all experience is accompanied by an affective response and because this response is an embodied feeling of cost/reward, people are compelled to optimize their experience to keep it personally acceptable. We literally feel the consequences of not doing so on our own skins. The more intense your affective response is, the more you are motivated to engage or disengage the situation. Using your behavior, you constantly vote on whether the situations you live are worth having or if they too costly to endure.)) Essay / The Perception of Burden in Human Experience

In 2010, a service known as ‘Uber’ officially launched in the city of San Francisco, making it possible to summon a car with a private driver to your doorstep with the tap of a button. If you could afford it, there was now no need to call a limo service on the phone and no need to stand by the curb waiting to hail a cab. The service also spared users the trouble of dealing with payment, which typically occurred at the end of the a cab ride. By bringing unmatched convenience to local transportation, the service became an instant success.

As Uber expanded to other cities and started competing with traditional taxi services, the model of on-demand convenience they pioneered spread like a wildfire through the startup world. Venture capitalists started funneling cash to hundreds of new companies billing themselves as "the Uber for X". One smartphone app at a time, a world of physical goods and services became available directly from the screens of our personal devices. Peddling a modern lifestyle of convenience and sophistication, the on-demand economy took off.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that convenience is king. A course of action is ‘convenient’ when it is favorable and unimpeded. In the hypothetical bar situation at the top, for example, it would’ve been way more convenient to engage the beauty if you were both unaccompanied and sitting at the bar a couple of empty seats from each other. For something to be convenient means that the experiential costs associated with seeking that something are ‘conveniently low’. Offering convenience, in other words, is all about reducing deterrent friction.

With a few caveats, people only willfully endure trouble or expose themselves to the possibility of experiencing trouble if they expect it to be worth it. Take a look around: People don't walk to the second-closest supermarket unless they can't find a wanted item or service in the closest one. People don't assemble furniture unless the price advantage is worth it. People don't like waiting in line, but will do so if there's no other way. People don't stop at the gas station only for fun. People don't seek trouble. That is why, for most products and services, reducing friction is a winning proposition; because if you were given the option to avoid the pains of a course of action, wouldn't you do it? People naturally avoid friction because it's a way to optimize their experience.

Friction is not necessarily bad. In the physical world, friction holds things in place; it prevents people from slipping when they walk and helps their vehicles brake at the stop light. Something analogous happens in the world of experience: For better or worse, friction holds behavior in place; it keeps us from getting into trouble and from taking excessive risks.

As experiential costs, frictions give us moments of reflection on the behaviors we are pursuing. "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?" — a thoughtful UX designer offers the user a moment of reflection before letting them accomplish an irreversible task, some frustration may be spared if you give them an opportunity to think things through.

Contemplating a dystopian future where the city of San Francisco turns into an ‘assisted-living’ community for the affluent young, product and design strategist Steve Selzer (formerly at Airbnb/Frog Design) warns against eradicating the frictions of life:

"By removing all friction, we remove moments for personal growth, serendipity, and self-reflection. At scale, these erode our social values and skew our lives towards intolerance and impatience, a lack of resilience and an inability to navigate change."

And he may be right. By eliminating the frictions of life we have become a society of consumers, people who create experiences for others but never create experiences for themselves. A world awash in convenience gives us the dangerous incentive of never doing things on our own, of never facing risk and never knowing what it takes. By depriving ourselves of friction, we forget the true value of things. It's easy to forget, but everyday we create the stories of our lives; and a life without toil never made a good story.

Key / The Human Sense of Value