Human-AI Interaction
UT Austin
UX Research
Everyone is building for speed. No one is building for thinking.
So we built an AI ideation tool that gets in your way on purpose, in two different ways, then ran a study to find out what that does to a person’s thinking.
AI ideation tools compete on removing effort. But when the thing you are making is an idea, the effort is the work. People take the first polished answer and stop thinking.
Designed the interface and the turn structure for an ideation tool with two kinds of deliberate friction built in. One makes you assemble the idea yourself. The other argues with you. Then we tested both against a plain chatbot.
Fast, automatic thinking fell from 79% to 42%. Four of five people quit the plain chatbot before it was finished. Only one of the two friction mechanisms also made people feel the idea was theirs.
The Problem
The ideas that lose to filing friction are the ones nobody else has.
We audited what people actually reach for when they make things. Every one of them competes on the same axis: less effort between wanting a thing and having it. That promise is a good one when you already know what you want. Book the flight. Resize the image. Write the email you have already composed in your head. The faster the tool gets out of the way, the better it is.
An idea is not like that. You do not know what you want yet. Working it out is the task, and the thinking is what does the working out. So when a tool removes the effort, it has not saved you time. It has removed the only part that was getting you anywhere.
People take what the model hands them and move on. The generative half of the work quietly moves to the machine.
Person and model converge within a turn or two. There is no disagreement left to explore.
An idea that arrives finished is easy to abandon. Effort is what makes it yours.
Why it happens
A polished answer never trips the wire
Thinking runs in two gears. One is fast, associative and effortless. The other is slow, deliberate and expensive. Creative work needs both, because one generates and the other evaluates. The handoff between them is not voluntary. Slow thinking engages when fast thinking hits something it cannot resolve. Confusion is the trigger.
AI output arrives syntactically perfect and conceptually shallow. Nothing looks wrong, so nothing asks you to look again.
Research
The ideas that lose to filing friction are the ones nobody else has.
We audited what people actually reach for when they make things. Every one of them competes on the same axis: less effort between wanting a thing and having it. That promise is a good one when you already know what you want. Book the flight. Resize the image. Write the email you have already composed in your head. The faster the tool gets out of the way, the better it is.
An idea is not like that. You do not know what you want yet. Working it out is the task, and the thinking is what does the working out. So when a tool removes the effort, it has not saved you time. It has removed the only part that was getting you anywhere.
People take what the model hands them and move on. The generative half of the work quietly moves to the machine.
Person and model converge within a turn or two. There is no disagreement left to explore.
An idea that arrives finished is easy to abandon. Effort is what makes it yours.
Why it happens
A polished answer never trips the wire
Thinking runs in two gears. One is fast, associative and effortless. The other is slow, deliberate and expensive. Creative work needs both, because one generates and the other evaluates. The handoff between them is not voluntary. Slow thinking engages when fast thinking hits something it cannot resolve. Confusion is the trigger.