Is All Friction Bad?

COCenk Onur Ozan ·14 May 2026Published 14 May 2026 ·2 min read

Those of us who work on customer experience have accepted one principle for years with hardly any questioning: remove all friction. Fewer clicks, fewer steps, ideally zero effort. Research by Gartner, formerly CEB, also shows a strong link between low effort and loyalty. Yet there is a detail I think is often skipped: low effort and zero friction are not the same thing.

With digitalisation, we reduced experience to a fast, smooth flow. The human mind, however, does not process deeply what slides past without any effort at all. Psychology describes a tendency called effort justification: the more people put into something, the more they feel it is theirs. We all know the odd attachment we feel to a shelf we assembled ourselves.

According to Kahneman’s peak-end rule, we remember an experience less by its whole than by its most intense moments and how it ended. My observation is that these peaks often form at a small moment of uncertainty, a decision point or a deliberate pause; in other words, at a kind of friction. The problem with digital products that work flawlessly yet leave no trace in anyone’s mind lies, I think, in this illusion of frictionlessness.

That does not mean all friction is good, of course. In design we need to separate two kinds clearly. Complicated processes, broken buttons, system errors and unnecessary forms are bad friction; there is no debate about getting rid of them. The small moments where users make choices, personalisation steps and deliberately designed pauses can count as good friction.

The extra ten seconds a user spends tailoring an experience to themselves is less lost time than a psychological investment that deepens the experience. In areas where important decisions are made, such as finance or health, designs that deliberately slow the user down a little to make them think can be far more valuable than trying to squeeze everything into seconds.

In a world where everything has become extraordinarily easy, the value of what comes easily falls too. It is no accident that luxury brands create waiting lists or that some platforms deliberately lengthen their approval processes.

So I find it more useful to go one step beyond “how do we make this easier?” and ask “how do we make this more meaningful?” The brands that stand out, I believe, will not be the ones blindly trying to erase every bit of friction, but the ones that put the right friction in the right place and design experiences people remember. In your experience, which friction should be removed, and which should be kept?

Cenk Onur Ozan COO, Cloud4Feed

Writes about customer experience, behaviour and the decisions that follow from listening.

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