Make friction your friend

This article was co-authored by Samantha Stephens, Abid Ladhani, Mario Bozzo, Dael Stewart, and Emily Xu

The word “frictionless” has reached buzzword status along with the likes of “personalization” and “big data” (yuck). From “frictionless commerce” to “frictionless activations”, any form of resistance in the user experience seems to have been deemed ‘bad’ (and usually for good reason).

But we’re here to give you a different perspective. In our collective experience building products at Freshbooks, Q4, Ritual.co, Loblaw Digital, Shopify, and Normative, we believe friction can be a “frenemy”… even a friend. We will specifically focus on friction in the…