Small hassles and extra steps can sharply reduce action.
More quotesThe waiter was not taking the order. The waiter was applying a tiny tax on depravity.
Say “quadruple bacon” to a human being and you must briefly become the sort of person who orders quadruple bacon. Tap it on glass and it is merely configuration. The screen does not snigger, raise an eyebrow or repeat your choices back to the table. So the pizza gets bigger. The same trick lets a shopper investigate an embarrassing product at midnight, a music fan enjoy an uncool genre without witnesses and a software buyer quietly configure the ludicrous enterprise package before admitting the budget. Sometimes privacy reveals demand. Sometimes it removes the last sane pause before excess.
This is why “frictionless” is such a lazy product ambition. Friction is neither good nor bad; it is a bouncer. Sack it and find out what it had been keeping outside. Remove shame from asking for medical information: excellent. Remove the effort from cancelling: decent. Remove every reminder that game tokens are real money: rather convenient for the seller. I want designers to name the inhibition they are removing and say, without euphemism, who benefits when it disappears. If the honest answer is “people will spend more because the transaction stops feeling real”, at least we have stopped pretending the interface is neutral.