Friction as a Design Material
Most software is built to remove effort. Some of the most useful products add a little back, on purpose and in the right place.
The default instruction in software design is to remove friction: fewer taps, fewer fields, fewer decisions. It is a good instruction most of the time. It also has an obvious exception. Some of the things people most want from a product are things they want it to make slightly harder.
When the product is on your side against yourself
Mindset X blocks distracting apps and websites and keeps them blocked until the work is done. That is friction by definition, and it is the whole point. The person who sets it up is not confused about what they want. They have made a decision at a calm moment and are asking the software to hold them to it at a less calm one.
That changes how you design it. The friction has to be real enough to matter, otherwise it is a suggestion. It also has to be legible: the person should always be able to see what is blocked, why, and what finishing looks like. Friction that feels arbitrary is just a bad product.
When the friction protects someone else
SameWay matches people who need to send a parcel or a document with travellers already going the same way. Two of its mechanisms are deliberate friction. Payments are held in escrow until delivery, and delivery is confirmed with a code that only the receiver knows. Both slow the process by a few seconds. Both exist because two strangers are involved and each needs a reason to trust the other.
Here the friction is not between a person and their own habits but between two people who have never met. The escrow and the handoff code are what let the transaction happen at all.
A test for useful friction
Three questions are worth asking. Does the person know it is there and why? Does it protect something they care about, whether their own intentions or someone else's trust? And could it be smaller without stopping doing that job? If the answer to the last question is yes, make it smaller. If the answer to the first is no, it is not design, it is an obstacle.
Removing effort is usually right. The craft is in knowing which effort was carrying weight.
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