13. Friction and Guidance

Now that you have a grasp of the ways an app can be simple or complex, it’s time to get back to thinking about the interaction between the app and the user. This chapter is about how to influence the user’s behavior toward or away from certain interactions and help her find her way through the app.

From a standpoint totally naïve to software design, it may seem as if you would want to make every interaction as easy as possible. Why should anything be more difficult than necessary? The “everything one or two clicks away” approach that the desktop took for years, as you saw in Chapter 12, takes that position.

The answer is that not all interactions a user can have with software are equally consequential. Part of the responsibility ...

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