Friction by design

Consider a few things that are deliberately hard to use.

A child lock on a car door cannot be opened from the inside. That is friction: intentional, designed, and exactly right. A medicine bottle with a childproof cap requires two hands and a specific technique. A confirmation dialog before you delete something important makes you stop and think for a second. These are not design failures. They are friction working as intended.

The examples are obvious, but the principle they point to is easy to ignore in practice: friction is a signal. It tells you that something matters, that there is a consequence, that you should slow down. The goal was never to remove that signal. The goal was to remove the signals that were misleading or in the way.

There is a well-documented phenomenon sometimes called the IKEA effect: when you build something yourself, you value it more. The effort is part of the attachment. The assembly is not a flaw in the product experience. For many people, it is part of why the product feels like theirs.

The same logic applies beyond furniture. A vinyl record requires more from you than a streaming playlist. You have to choose it, handle it, put it on, and stay near it. That effort is friction. It is also why the experience feels different: more deliberate, more present, more meaningful.

Effort creates investment. Investment creates attachment. A product that removes every trace of effort can also remove every reason to care.

This is the more useful frame: not "how do we remove friction?" but "which friction serves the user, and which does not?"

The friction that slows someone down before an irreversible action: keep it. The friction that makes a product feel effortful to learn in a way that pays off: keep it. The friction that comes from poor information architecture, unclear labelling, or a process nobody has thought through: remove it.

The distinction requires you to understand what the friction is actually doing. That means going back to the problem. What is the user trying to accomplish? What are the consequences of getting it wrong? What does the effort of doing this thing mean to them?

A banking app should be easy to check your balance and hard to make a large transfer to a new account. Those are not contradictory design goals. They are the same design goal, applied to two different moments with different stakes.

There is a version of this that goes wrong in a specific way. Products that engineer desire, using dark patterns, infinite scroll, deliberately ambiguous cancel buttons, are also removing friction. But they are removing it in the user's way, not for the user's benefit.

That is a different kind of friction removal: the kind that optimises for engagement at the expense of the person being engaged. It is worth naming, because it looks like good UX from the inside and feels like something else from the outside.

The question that cuts through it is simple: who does this friction removal serve? If the answer is the product or the business, but not the user, it probably should not happen.

Good friction is intentional. It exists because someone made a deliberate decision that slowing the user down, or making something require a little more effort, produces a better outcome. For the user, not just for the metrics.

It is not friction because nobody got around to fixing it. It is not friction because the technology made it hard. It is friction because a thoughtful designer decided it should be there.

Removing friction is a skill. Knowing when not to is the harder one.