smartigoFrictionless isn't harmless
When did you last use an app that stopped you? One that asked: "Are you sure?", "Don't you want to try it yourself first?", "Wait, what do you think?"
Exactly. That almost never happens. And that's on purpose.
The rule of zero friction
In product development there is a dogma so self-evident that you hardly hear it any more: Reduce friction. One click less, every step shorter, every decision taken off your hands. Do it well and you get more users, more revenue and better reviews.
And from the point of view of a single moment, that's true. Nobody wants twelve steps for a purchase. Nobody wants to guess which password they used this time.
The problem only arises when you scale it up: to years, to hundreds of apps, to all areas of life at once. Then nothing is hard any more. Not ordering, not finding, not remembering and not deciding. Everyday life just glides along on rails.
Why resistance is a tool
The learning researcher Robert Bjork calls these desirable difficulties. The basic idea: things that feel a bit laborious while you learn them stick better. The brain files them away more deeply when it had to work for them.
A well-known example is retrieval. In a classic study by Roediger and Karpicke (2006), people who quizzed themselves from memory after reading a text did markedly better after a week than people who just re-read it several times. The second felt easier. The first worked.
That's the uncomfortable truth behind almost everything we're good at: The feeling of ease and the effect of learning are two different things. Sometimes they work against each other.
An escalator gets you to the top. It has never made anyone's legs stronger.
Where friction is missed
Notice what we're not asking for. Nobody wants to make the banking form more complicated. Friction isn't a virtue in itself. It's only worth something where we gain from it ourselves.
Questions you can use to check this:
- Is there still a place in your everyday life where you deliberately think hard without anyone paying you for it?
- When did you last solve something that had no other purpose than being solved?
- When did a task last really challenge you, and it still felt good?
If the answer is "I honestly don't remember", that's no shame. It just shows that this spot has gone empty in a lot of lives, and nothing else has filled it.
A small counter-movement
It doesn't take a grand gesture. Make a few small things harder on purpose: to look for the way once without navigation, to work out the total at the checkout in your head, to say your shopping list out loud once more before you leave.
That's unspectacular. And it only works if you do it regularly. That's exactly where most good resolutions fail: not because of the idea, but because nothing reminds us, nothing rewards us, and the comfortable alternative is always already in our pocket.
We're building a place for exactly this small counter-movement.