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Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

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Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#31

Post by rglullis »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #26
wlesieutre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tap-to-pay NFC credit cards Chip and pin or even chip and signature is just too much effort to pay for something

To do this, are they using some kind of modified payment terminal with extended range somehow? My understanding is that the NFC coils have to be very close, like single-digit cm to get any kind of power or data through.

Have you been to a Carnival party in Brazil? Most of the time, you won't have "single-digit cm" between you and the next closest to you.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#32

Post by bluGill »

rglullis wrote: post #18
bluGill wrote: post #11

This article is light in details, but I'm going to guess that the money stolen was crypto of some sort. It is unlikely you could pull this off with regular banks as banks log everything. Sure if I gave you my checking account number you could take all the money I have in there - but the banks all know who got that money and so when I go to the police there is a trail to trace and much higher odds I get it back. This…

It says right in the first paragraph it was crypto. Still, if you think the problem doesn't apply to "real money": there was this story in Brazil some years ago of thieves going around to Carnival parties with NFC-enabled payment machines. They got away with hundreds of thousands of BRL just by walking in the middle of the crowd with the machine set to collect a small payment. IOW, people were getting robbed because…

I didn't say it doesn't apply to real money. I said there is a lot more logging so you have a better chance of finding where the money went, catching them, and getting your money back. It isn't perfect, and it does depend on Brazil's courts. It also depends on someone going through a lot of effort, it isn't automatic.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#34

Post by aqfamnzc »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #26
wlesieutre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tap-to-pay NFC credit cards Chip and pin or even chip and signature is just too much effort to pay for something

To do this, are they using some kind of modified payment terminal with extended range somehow? My understanding is that the NFC coils have to be very close, like single-digit cm to get any kind of power or data through.

(Reply depth reached) I guess if you're filtering through a big crowd then indeed you could get really close to people and their wallets. I thought GP was saying you could immediately skim every person in a crowd at once.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#35

Post by skybrian »

rglullis wrote: post #18
bluGill wrote: post #11

This article is light in details, but I'm going to guess that the money stolen was crypto of some sort. It is unlikely you could pull this off with regular banks as banks log everything. Sure if I gave you my checking account number you could take all the money I have in there - but the banks all know who got that money and so when I go to the police there is a trail to trace and much higher odds I get it back. This…

It says right in the first paragraph it was crypto. Still, if you think the problem doesn't apply to "real money": there was this story in Brazil some years ago of thieves going around to Carnival parties with NFC-enabled payment machines. They got away with hundreds of thousands of BRL just by walking in the middle of the crowd with the machine set to collect a small payment. IOW, people were getting robbed because…

US passports have a cover that makes it hard to read the chip unless opened. I don’t know how well it works, but it seems like something similar would be useful for payment cards, even if there’s no PIN.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#36

Post by eternityforest »

wlesieutre wrote: post #22
samatman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to set Apple Pay to activate without user input, is this not true in Android?

Tap-to-pay NFC credit cards Chip and pin or even chip and signature is just too much effort to pay for something

Chip and pin can be unreliable because of bad contacts

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#37

Post by eternityforest »

I don't use and have no interest in using crypto, but I do notice that emails can easily be sent to the wrong person, and very little thought seems to go into stopping this.

We have "Do you really want to send this" that doesn't even tell you who it's sending it to. "Do you really want to send this to X" with a slide lock, and a little box with a brief summary, would be so much better.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#38

Post by rglullis »

bluGill wrote: post #32
rglullis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says right in the first paragraph it was crypto. Still, if you think the problem doesn't apply to "real money": there was this story in Brazil some years ago of thieves going around to Carnival parties with NFC-enabled payment machines. They got away with hundreds of thousands of BRL just by walking in the middle of the crowd with the machine set to collect a small payment. IOW, people were getting robbed because…

I didn't say it doesn't apply to real money. I said there is a lot more logging so you have a better chance of finding where the money went, catching them, and getting your money back. It isn't perfect, and it does depend on Brazil's courts. It also depends on someone going through a lot of effort, it isn't automatic.

Still, we are now being forced to spend an uncountable amount of time and resources to create a system that can mitigate an issue brought by some technology which was supposed to save us what, 10 seconds of each in-person transaction? It makes no sense.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#39

Post by GMoromisato »

I agree with the sentiment, but this is UX 101.

UX isn't about always letting the user do something as fast as possible--that's just cargo cult UX. UX is about reducing the obstacles between user-intent and computer action. We want the computer to carry out the user's intent.

Sometimes that means frictionless UI: if I'm changing a font size, I want direct manipulation, instant feedback, etc. But if I'm transferring money, I want to make sure there are no mistakes and sometimes that means friction: confirmation steps, etc.

Saying that friction is good is just as useless as saying that speed is good. The whole point of UX design is to know when it's good and when it's not.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#40

Post by vonjuice »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #27
thfuran wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frankly amazing how slow a lot of everyday stuff is given how damn fast modern hardware is.

It sure seems like modern hardware's speed is wasted on making things slightly easier for devs, rather than speed or performance increases for users huh. If 29 layers of abstraction saves a little dev time over 5 layers, that's fine, but it feels like it creates this unnecessary requirement to use <5y old hardware to run things smoothly

From electron instances everywhere, to the niche suckless philosophy, so much of software seems to be programmer-first. Truly missing the forest for the trees.
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