When to Add Friction to a User Journey (And When to Remove It)

The short answer

Add friction to a user journey at points where speed is not the goal. For example, where a user is about to commit information, perform an irreversible action, or make a decision with consequences they can’t easily undo. Remove friction at points where users are delayed because the design is unclear, incomplete, or forces them to figure something out rather than being told. The test is not ‘is this slow?’ but ‘is this slowness doing useful work for the user?’

The decision framework: four questions to ask at any friction point

Before removing or adding friction at a specific point in a journey, work through these four questions. They don’t require user research to apply, and they can be used in a design review with the journey in front of you.

1. Is this friction caused by unclear design, or by deliberate design?

Friction caused by unclear design such as missing labels, vague confirmation messages, and unpredictable transitions, should be removed by fixing the underlying design problem, not by moving users faster past it. Friction caused by deliberate design such as a confirmation before a destructive action, or a summary before final submission, should be evaluated on its own terms.

2. What is the user’s commitment level at this point?

The higher the commitment required from the user, the more appropriate friction becomes. A user who is about to delete an account, submit a financial transaction, or commit an irreversible change needs the space to verify their intent. A user who is navigating a low-stakes informational journey does not need to be slowed down at every step.

3. What happens if the user makes a mistake here?

If the answer is ‘it’s easy to correct,’ friction is less necessary. If the answer is ‘correction is difficult, requires support contact, or can’t be undone,’ protective friction is justified. The harder the consequence, the more deliberate the pause before it should be.

4. Does removing this friction move the problem or solve it?

This is the most important question. If a journey step is causing hesitation or delay, removing it doesn’t necessarily resolve the underlying cause. If users are pausing on a review screen because an earlier step was confusing, removing the review screen moves users past the pause without resolving the confusion. The confusion will reappear as an error, a support contact, or abandonment far later in the user’s journey which is much more difficult to trace back to the root cause.

Friction to remove: a practical checklist

The following patterns indicate unintentional friction that should be identified and resolved:

• Users hesitate at a step that isn’t a commitment point, indicating earlier ambiguity hasn’t been resolved
• Users repeat an action to check whether it worked, indicating insufficient outcome feedback
• Users backtrack unnecessarily, indicating missing or unclear next-step guidance
• Error messages appear but don’t explain what to do, adding cognitive load without resolution
• Loading states have no meaningful indication of what is happening, creating uncertainty during waits
• Form validation only surfaces on submission, forcing correction work to the end rather than distributing it through the journey

Friction to keep: a practical checklist

The following patterns indicate intentional friction that should be maintained or strengthened:

• Review and confirm screens before final submission. Even if they add a step, they reduce submissions with errors and support contact.
• Explicit confirmation dialogs before destructive actions, deletion, cancellation, and irreversible changes warrant a deliberate pause.
• Summary screens before commitment in multi-stage journeys. Users who have entered complex information benefit from seeing it before they submit.
• Clear ‘what happens next’ information before a non-reversible progression. Users shouldn’t have to discover the consequences of proceeding after they’ve proceeded.

A note on optimisation pressure

In many teams, the pressure to optimise journeys for speed or completion metrics creates a structural bias toward removing friction. Review screens, confirmation steps, and summary pages are easy to frame as ‘unnecessary steps’ when the primary lens is click count or time-on-task.

The challenge is that the cost of removing intentional friction often doesn’t appear in the same metrics that justified its removal. Correction rates, support contacts, and user confidence don’t live in the same dashboard as completion rate. The removal looks like a win. The cost is invisible until it isn’t.

A practical safeguard is to include support contact volume and error rate alongside completion rate and time-on-task in any journey optimisation review. If a change improves one metric and worsens another, it warrants re-examination before it ships.

Frequently asked questions