It’s December, 1999.

With 24 days until Christmas, Amazon and bookselling giant Barnes & Noble are officially at war.

Amazon has secured a controversial patent for 1-Click: a system that lets shoppers buy with a single click – and more importantly, stops competitors from doing the same.

After a messy legal battle, the verdict finally comes in.

Amazon can sell with one click, Barnes & Noble is forced to make customers go through two. With Christmas orders piling up, the rival bookseller has no choice but to make checkout a split second longer.

Amazon knew that single extra click was all it took for doubt to creep in.

So they got to work making it completely disappear.

Easy Does It

The human brain is wildly intolerant of minor inconvenience.

Whether it’s an extra step at checkout, a password reset or just having to go and get something from upstairs, small amounts of friction have disproportionate effects on our behaviour.

Our brains are drawn to the path of least resistance like a moth to a flame.

Cognitive effort is expensive, so the more steps an activity takes, the less likely we are to follow through with it. This unfortunate quirk in our psychology hasn’t gone unnoticed by entrepreneurs  – entire business models now depend on removing the split second it takes to change our minds.

But the modern world hasn’t scrubbed friction away evenly.

Buying, watching and scrolling have been polished to a shine, while most of the things that make life meaningfully better remain stubbornly multi-step. Indulgence and instant gratification tend to attract the most frictionless solutions, making our most questionable choices the easiest ones to execute.

Funnily enough there’s no patent pending on the one-click salad.

The war on inconvenience was brilliant, right up until it made all the wrong things effortless.

On Second Thoughts

Bad habits thrive on excellent logistics.

When an action delivers a dopamine hit for almost no effort, the brain doesn’t waste much time converting it into a habit. Repetition does the rest, and before long the whole thing runs like a car on cruise control.

Friction throws a spanner in the works of this neatly rehearsed sequence.

Adding an extra step knocks a behaviour out of autopilot and back into conscious control. A split-second interruption can be the difference between feeling an impulse and acting on it – when it comes to breaking bad habits, a little inconvenience goes a long way.