Shoppers walk through Yorkdale Mall in search of Black Friday sales in Toronto on Nov. 26, 2021.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
In technology, there’s a principle that’s repeated so much that it verges on dogma: Good design is frictionless.
Convenience is the North Star because productivity is close to godliness, and any nuisance that prevents people from achieving their goals is the enemy. Asking for a login or credit-card information, blocking a page with a pop-up box, or sending users to another app – product designers treat these so-called “pain points” with the delicacy and urgency that doctors do with fractures.
That’s particularly true in e-commerce, where each cart that’s abandoned (which happens about 70 per cent of the time) represents lost revenue – and so a smooth “customer journey” is spoken about with reverence. The innovations in that field have been greasing our slide to the Buy Now button since Amazon patented one-click shopping in 1999. Now, online shopping is effectively seamless, from the moment an algorithm delivers you an ad based on your distilled data, to the offer of free returns, to the automated filling-in of saved details, to the product’s rush shipping to your doorstep. “When you reduce friction, make something easier, people do more of it,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said.
And how. Even in this economy, Canadians’ spending on Black Friday this year grew by 11 per cent and transaction size increased by 7 per cent, according to Moneris. More money will be splashed around during the holidays and during the federal GST break, which runs until mid-February. In just a couple of taps, you can now have a heavy appliance or a used car at your door.
But the premise at the heart of it all is wrong, because buying something should require some effort. Rational purchasing power is the most powerful tool individuals have in modern capitalism, but the online marketplace is designed to separate you from your money – and your good sense – as quickly as possible. Simplicity is certainly not a bad thing, but it’s also not inherently good, and it’s become far too easy to shop unthinkingly online, enabling shopping addictions, debt, injuries among warehouse and delivery workers under increasing pressure, and environmental damage. Besides, if the holidays are about spending quality time, why should we be hurried into spending a lot of money?
Consider the promise of free returns, a costly and complicated offering that online shoppers now view as table stakes. Free returns assure consumers they can buy before they’re ready, unburdening them of such purchase-delaying concerns as fit and need. And they’re heavily relied upon: In America, US$247-billion in merchandise bought online was returned last year, with return rates as high as 17.6 per cent.
Rather than restocking, companies typically send much of what they receive to the landfill or have the products destroyed because of cost efficiency, a lack of processing capacity, or a desire to maintain product exclusivity. In the U.S., returns produce more than 3.6 million tonnes of waste and as much as 24 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year. Shoppers may expect returns to be free, but nothing really is – and so the Earth pays the price.
Intentionally deployed friction can be useful. The financial-services industry’s approval requirements avert error and fraud, and two-factor authentication’s cybersecurity benefits are more than worth it. A built-in pause could let online shoppers ask if they really need that TikTok-trending item and encourage them to put more thought into their purchases; that would imbue the purchases with a kind of meaning and make them less disposable.
Technology will only deliver people what they want, though – so it’s shoppers who must adjust their expectations and stop feeling they are owed maximum convenience. Much as race-car drivers aim to reduce tire friction for speed while retaining enough grip to round the corners, we need to restore the online-shopping balance or we’ll crash before the first turn. We need to be willing to exert a little effort and understand that it benefits us.
Here’s another example of useful friction: when we try to empty the trash folder on our computers, it triggers a pop-up asking if you’re sure you want to proceed. That quick confirmation lets you ask if you’re ready to do something significant: permanently delete data.
Maybe following that model this holiday season – slowing down, looking around and reflecting on what you actually need – will prevent us from making impulse buys that are destined for the trash, too.