Digital teams are trained to remove effort. But in creativity, UX and service design, some friction helps people think and choose with more care.
Neal Stephenson’s recent piece on writing by hand reminds us of a useful point for those running or designing digital products and systems. Some friction built into key processes can improve attention, make actions more deliberate and help protect important decisions. Providing a confirmation step before deleting gives the user a moment’s pause to understand the consequence. In our work, design and technical reviews force our project teams to explain the problem properly.
But this doesn’t mean that all friction is good – needless barriers make experience worse. As AI and automation make digital work faster and easier to produce, we risk removing the moments of friction where judgement used to happen.
Experiment of the week: audit a single journey or process on your site or platform. What slows people down because the design is weak? What slows people down because the decision deserves more thought?
The best digital experiences make simple things easy and important things considered.
Source: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your
