How We React to Cognitive Friction

Most people, even apologists, react to cognitive friction in the same way. They take the minimum they need from it and ignore the rest. Each user learns the smallest set of features that he needs to get his work done, and he abandons the rest. The apologists proudly point out that their wristwatches can synchronize with their desktop calendar systems, but they conveniently neglect to mention that it has been six months since they used that feature. They will get defensive about it if you press them on the point, but that is what makes them apologists.

My home-entertainment system has literally thousands of features. I'm not an apologist, but I certainly qualify as a gadget freak. I have learned how to use some of its gratuitous features, but they are too hard to use effectively. For example, my television has a feature called "picture-in-picture" (PIP). It superimposes a second, smaller screen showing another channel in the lower-right corner of the main screen. It is all done in software and can be completely controlled by buttons on the remote control. In theory, it is useful for such circumstances as keeping an eye on the football game in the PIP screen while I'm watching a movie on the main screen. When the salesperson demonstrated it to me in the electronics showroom, it seemed quite useful.

The problem is that it is just too difficult to control; there is too much cognitive friction involved in using it, and I cannot master it sufficiently well to make it worth the effort. It's just more enjoyable to watch one channel, as in the old days when one channel was all that the technology could deliver. Nobody else in my family has bothered to use the PIP facility even once, except by accident, and I occasionally come home to find someone watching TV with a PIP screen up. As soon as I walk in the room, he or she asks me to turn it off.

My TV has a 55'' screen and a Dolby sound system, and it receives a digital signal from an orbiting satellite, but otherwise my family members and I use it in exactly the same way we used our snowy, tinny, 19'' Motorola in 1975. All of those features go unused.

You can predict which features in any new technology will be used and which won't. The use of a feature is inversely proportional to the amount of interaction needed to control it. In other words, the bigger, brighter, sharper screen on my new TV demands no interaction on my part, so it is used 100% of the time my TV is on, and I'm quite happy with it. The satellite system is a very desirable dancing bear of a feature, so I put up with the complexity of source-signal switching to watch the satellite broadcast once a week or so. Nobody else in my family was able to figure out how to view the satellite until I created a plastic-laminated cheat sheet that sits on the coffee table with a checklist of switches, buttons, and settings that must be made to connect up. The PIP system not only uses a complex system of over a dozen buttons, but its interaction is very obscure and its behavior is unpleasant. After the first couple of tries, I abandoned it completely, as has everyone else.

This pattern of cognitive friction abandonment can be found in every office or household with every software-based product.