Frictionless Design Is Overrated: Why Good UX Sometimes Needs to Slow You Down

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Monday, 01 September 2025

6 Mins

by Format-3

For years, the tech industry has chased the holy grail of frictionless design. One-click checkout. Instant recommendations. Autoplay everything. Entire product roadmaps are built on a single question: How do we make this faster?

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: frictionless design isn’t always good design. Sometimes, the moments that slow us down are the ones that build trust, create meaning, and even spark joy.

The Problem With Frictionless Obsession

When we strip out every barrier between intention and action, we often strip out something else too: reflection.

Think about Amazon’s one-click purchase. It’s brilliant in terms of efficiency, until you realize you’ve just bought 10 packs of snickers you didn’t mean to at 2 a.m as an individual who has a nut allergy. Removing friction creates speed, but it also removes the pause that helps us make better decisions (and sometimes stupid ones…).

Or look at social media infinite scroll. It feels seamless, smooth, and intuitive, but it’s designed to keep you consuming endlessly, without noticing how much time you’ve lost doom scrolling mid day. That’s frictionless at its worst: efficient, but exploitative.

Where Friction Adds Value

Not all friction is bad. In fact, the right kind of friction can make experiences better. Here’s how:

Security & Trust
- When you transfer money in banking apps like Revolut, you often get two or three confirmation steps. Is it slower? Yes. But that friction builds reassurance, you want to know your money won’t disappear with a single accidental tap.
Learning & Mastery
- In Duolingo, progress isn’t frictionless. You repeat, retry, and sometimes fail. But that effort is what makes you learn. If it were too easy, you’d quit faster. Mirroring a sort of real world experience.
Ethical Guardrails
- Think about Gmail’s “Undo Send.” That extra 5–30 seconds of artificial delay is friction, but it’s saved countless people from sending the wrong email to the wrong person in absolute panic.
Delight & Memorability
- Slack’s playful loading messages (“While you wait, here’s a haiku…”) are technically friction. They slow you down. But they turn a moment of frustration into something memorable, even delightful.

Where our team has seen this recently

Recently we worked on an AI product that aims to be the future of enterprise workflow automation. The problem we encountered was that what we had created was too quick, too seamless, and too reliant on the machine.

Now this may raise some eyebrows, but we learnt through rigorous testing our solution failed at giving back trust to the user; the end result was too quick to be believable. We combated this with delightful transitions, making every step transparent, and giving a sense of ‘damn this thing is really doing it!’.

We also found for this product to be adapted by enterprises, we needed to add in layers of security that did prolong the experience but ensured valuable company data was protected and held compliance within organisations.

Designing Good Friction

The real opportunity in design today isn’t removing every obstacle. It’s knowing the difference between bad friction (confusing sign-up flows, hidden menus, unnecessary steps) and good friction (moments that create trust, learning, or delight).

And with AI now powering so many “instant” experiences, this becomes even more important. If AI is doing the hard work in the background, designers need to ask:

Where do we slow the human down? Sometimes it’s to confirm, sometimes it’s to teach, and sometimes it’s just to give them a smile.

The Pause Is the Point

Frictionless design made sense when the internet was young and clunky. But now, the challenge isn’t speed; It’s intentionality.

Good design leaders know that sometimes the best experience isn’t the fastest one. It’s the one that gives people space to think, to feel confident, or to enjoy the moment.