Friction is a design decision, not an accident
Every extra field and confirmation step is a filter. The only real question is whether you meant to filter there.
By Shashi Kumar ·
"Reduce friction" is one of those pieces of product advice that is right often enough to be dangerous.
Friction is a filter. Remove it everywhere and you have removed every filter you had — including the ones doing useful work.
Friction you should remove
- Fields you will never use. Every optional field on a form is a small tax on everyone who fills it in, paid to a spreadsheet column nobody reads.
- Account creation before value. Making someone register before they see anything is asking for commitment before you have earned it.
- Re-entering what you already know. If the user told you their country, do not make them pick their currency.
- Confirmation dialogs for reversible actions. "Are you sure?" on something you can undo trains people to click through warnings, which means the one that mattered gets clicked through too.
Friction you should keep — or add
- Before destructive, irreversible actions. Deleting an account should be slightly annoying. Type the name. Make the pause real.
- Before spending money. A one-click purchase with no review step produces revenue and refunds in roughly equal measure.
- Where you genuinely need commitment. A slightly longer application form produces fewer, better applicants. If your problem is quality of leads rather than quantity, friction is the tool, not the enemy.
- At the point of no return in anything collaborative. Publishing to a team, sending to a client, going live. A moment's pause has saved more embarrassment than any feature I have shipped.
The reframe that helps
Do not ask "how do I reduce friction?" Ask:
Who am I trying to filter out here, and is that working?
If the answer is "nobody" — remove it. If the answer is "people who are not serious" — keep it, and make sure it filters on seriousness rather than on patience, technical literacy or eyesight.
That last distinction is where most badly-designed friction lives. A confusing form does not filter for commitment. It filters for tolerance of confusion, which correlates with nothing you want.
An example from my own site
The pricing calculator on this site gives you a real number without asking for anything — no email, no form, no "book a call to find out".
That is deliberate friction removal at the top, because the thing I want more of is informed enquiries. Someone who has already seen the number and is still interested is a much better conversation than someone who filled in a form to discover it.
The friction comes later, at the quote form, where a few honest fields do real work: they tell me whether the project is a fit before either of us spends an hour finding out.
Same site. Friction removed in one place, added in another. Both on purpose.
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