Every interface tells you what kind of life it expects you to live.
The grocery app expects me to know what I want before I open it. The streaming service expects me to want what I have wanted before. The map expects me to take the fastest route. None of these are wrong, exactly — they are useful, and I use them — but it is worth noticing that they share a common ambition. They want my path through the day to be smoother than it would otherwise have been. They want, in the language of the industry, to reduce friction.
Friction, in this language, is the enemy. Friction is what happens when the world resists you. The mark of good design is the absence of resistance.
I want to make the case that this is, at best, a half-truth — and at worst a project that quietly impoverishes the lives of the people who fall furthest into it.
A walk through an unfamiliar street is friction. So is a conversation with a stranger. So is the search through a poorly-organised library, the wrong turn that becomes a discovery, the meal that takes an hour to cook. We do not call any of these things problems when we are inside them. We call them, when we have the words, life.
The frictionless interface is not, in the end, a neutral tool. It teaches a way of being. It teaches that the world should give you what you want, immediately, without resistance. It teaches that any deviation from the expected path is a failure of the system. And the longer you live inside it, the harder it becomes to trust any process whose outcome cannot be guaranteed in advance.
The cost is not visible on any quarterly report.
I’m not arguing for a return to anything. I am arguing for noticing — noticing where the friction has been removed, and asking, each time, whether what was removed was really an obstacle, or whether it was the activity itself.