Frictionless design — one-click purchases, infinite scroll, autoplay — is an unqualified good. Think of the last time you accidentally bought something, or lost an hour to algorithmic feeds that felt less like a choice and more like a treadmill. These interfaces aren’t just smooth; they’re slippery, engineered to dissolve resistance before anyone can notice it’s gone. But is this defectively simple design not lazy, but softly tyrannical?
Seamlessness promises freedom (“Buy now!”) while quietly amputating agency. Like exposed concrete, good design should show its effort – let the weight of a decision be felt. Instead, everything glides, so nothing sticks. We get digital vaseline.
This is not just a UX problem, however. Like most things in the world, it’s tied to a much broader structure — and it’s about a culture that confuses speed with efficiency, ease with tranquility. When Amazon shaves milliseconds off load times, it’s not serving you; it’s feeding your own worst impulses — the same ones that cause rage over a 2-second delay. We’ve trained ourselves to hate friction, only to miss interfaces that resist us sometimes. Buttons that ask “Sure?” before charging your card. It’s not inefficiency — to stop, visibly, is to be honest.
What we call “frictionless design” is really an architecture of surrender. This so-called tyranny isn’t in the design itself, but in how seamlessly it aligns with capitalism’s ultimate goal: to make desire indistinguishable from consumption, and thought indistinguishable from scrolling. The most radical interface wouldn’t be slow or clumsy, but deliberate: a digital equivalent of a staircase that forces noticing each step. Design resistance is the friction from the grit in the gears that let us feel the mechanism at work.
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