Friction.
One of the most misunderstood and wrongly maligned words in modern business.
[This is an intervention. It is my attempt to save a word that gets mauled in meetings, distracting designers from their duty.]

Somewhere along the way, “friction” got tossed in the same bucket as fax machines and middle managers. It became shorthand for “bad.”
We know it slows people down. Kill it. Automate it. Burn it down.

We’ve flattened the human experience into a glide path — smooth, sterile, soulless. Swipe right, skip the ad, one-click checkout. It’s all been optimised, minimised, sanitised — and now we’re wondering why everything feels empty and how we end up with a basket full of things we don’t need or a subscription we don’t use.

Friction isn’t the enemy. Shitty friction is.
There’s a difference. And it’s time we started talking about the quality of friction. Because friction isn’t just resistance. It’s presence. It’s engagement. It’s how we get to think and add meaning to our actions.

You don’t remember the effortless dinner. You remember the one where the sauce took five hours, the conversation got heated, and your date challenged your worldview between bites of burnt bread before smiling and touching your hand.
You don't care to remember every walk you had in the park but you can't forget the Everest climb. You've lost a toe to frostbite, you've trained for months and spent most of your savings. You did this without sherpas.
It was the proudest you have ever been of yourself. That’s extreme friction.

We live and die by meaningful experiences. But meaning doesn’t come from speed. It comes from struggle, tension, and reward. The gym hurts. Sex gets postponed.
Real conversations are awkward. These are not bugs. They’re features.

So no, friction doesn’t need to be eliminated when it comes to things we build.
It needs to be designed. Cultivated. Felt.

My problem with “Friction-Free”
The term friction has been stripped of its depth. It’s been reduced to a UX checkbox — a metric to be driven to zero. In the name of “frictionless” design, we’ve confused effortless with meaningless. We remove every bump in the road, then wonder why no one remembers the journey.

When designing products and services, the goal isn’t to sand down every edge. It’s to eliminate the dumb speed bumps while engineering the right kind of resistance. The kind that creates engagement. The kind that uncovers and deepens value.

Friction isn’t the enemy. It never was. What’s missing isn’t convenience. It’s context. And context is the bridge between effort and meaning. Between interaction and intention. Between just using something and actually caring about it.

Experience overload.
We’re drowning in “experiences.”
Everything is an experience now: ordering food, listening to music, and brushing your teeth. And when everything is an experience, nothing is.

We’ve diluted the term into marketing soup. Just-add-water branding. And yet, this endless stream of seamless experiences has made the truly meaningful ones harder to spot.

In a market saturated with options, where everything is easy and instant, the battleground isn’t just who offers the best product. It’s who makes the effort worth it.

At any given moment, the choice isn’t just between you and your competitors. It’s between you and Netflix. You and TikTok. You and sleep. You and the guilt of not starting that project you promised yourself six months ago.

Our brains love a scroll.
Let’s not pretend we’re rational beings. We are dopamine-chasing mammals with barely-upgraded firmware. Our brains are wired to seek rewards with the least resistance. Scroll, swipe, consume, repeat.

You can thank sugar, salt, cocaine, porn, and TikTok for mapping out the fastest route to the pleasure centre. And let’s be honest — we’re not that hard to hack.

Fun fact: it takes about 35 minutes to get hooked on TikTok.
Thirty-five minutes. That’s not engagement. That’s a slot machine in your pocket.

This is the dark side of frictionless: addiction. A human feature is turned into a bug, an exploit baked into the business model.
Design without values and principles becomes design for exploitation, and frictionless becomes an oiled trapdoor.

Back to Friction
The most meaningful experiences are tethered to personal values. What matters to someone isn’t about ease. It’s about alignment. Identity. Intention.

Some companies get this. Others sever the link completely and chase pure dopamine delivery. These aren’t experiences. They’re engineered compulsions. The addiction economy doesn’t want meaning. It wants clicks, time-on-site, and muscle memory disguised as choice.

And once that loop is learned, intention gets left behind.

Real meaning — the kind that builds loyalty, trust, and advocacy, comes with friction. Not annoying friction. Intentional, meaningful friction. The kind that says: “This matters, I’ll wait, I need to pay attention.”


A word about texture
Friction is only half the equation. The other half is texture. Texture is how friction feels. It’s what defines whether resistance becomes frustration or focus.

Think about tyres on the road. Friction is required for grip because texture + pressure gives control.

It’s the same with digital design. Lag frustrates. Weight engages. Texture is the difference between annoying and engaging. Between effort and satisfaction.

Too much friction, wrong texture, and people bail.
Too little friction, no texture — and they forget you.

The best experiences find the right balance between effort, incentive, and reward. And that balance isn’t found in spreadsheets. It’s felt.

So before you chase another seamless flow or frictionless funnel, do me a favour:

Close your eyes.
Remember the best experiences of your life, not the easiest ones.
The ones that cracked you open, rewired who you are, and made you feel.

That day when you learned to ride your bike and carried those bruises through your neighbourhood, like badges for a while.
The moment you first learned to love in a way that terrified you.
Your first tatoo or piercing.
The night you fought for something — or someone — and lost sleep but found meaning.
The years you spent raising a human, mindful of a debt they didn’t ask for but you’d die to pay.
The job you almost quit but didn’t, and somehow grew into someone new.
The mountain you climbed, knowing you’d probably lose a toe but gain a story no algorithm could fabricate. That’s friction.

Friction is what makes the hairs on your arms stand up.
Friction that leaves bruises, scars, and stories worth telling.
Friction that separates experience from convenience. The meh, from wow.

Design for that.