Stranger than friction: can experiences be too easy?

Our latest foster greyhound was a shredder. Notebooks, cardboard boxes, novels left carelessly on the edge of a desk… all were fair game for sweet Theodore, who just enjoyed 5 minutes of wanton destruction before settling down for another 3-hour nap. Whilst occasionally inconvenient, his casual theft of papery items also served as a timely reminder to take out the recycling, or in this case, to re-visit an article I tore out of a newspaper 6 months ago. We’ll come back to Theo’s other role in this story; for now, let’s see what was on that fragment of paper…

The new f-word: friction

The title that had caught my eye (and Theo’s taste buds): ‘The new f-word: friction’. If you can’t make it out in its torn-up state, here’s the opening paragraph:

Designers and technologists once spoke of “reducing friction” as a mark of progress. One-click shopping, on-demand entertainment, sex at a swipe – the elimination of effort became the organising principle of modern life. Now, though, as a generation who grew up worshipping seamless UX begin to look around and wonder what they’ve lost, everyone from luxury fashion houses to tech platforms is scratching their head over how best to add friction back.

(Alexandra Jones, Sunday Times)

This itchy little concept now keeps popping up with irritating frequency. Just last week, a webinar on AI in higher education concluded with a provocation that AI might be making some tasks so easy that friction needed to be re-introduced (cue chorus of approval from the academics in the audience). Wind back further to 2024, and we realise this is not a new discussion: the concept of ‘desirable difficulties’ in learning was a key topic at a university forum I attended on students’ experiences of learning, highlighting tensions between learning that feels good, and learning that actually has an impact.

So which is it? Are we still trying to create frictionless user experiences and smooth student journeys, or is there something about the hurdles and potholes we should be paying more attention to?

‘Friction-maxxing’ and the privilege of discomfort

Thanks to a viral article by freelance journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the term ‘friction-maxxing’ has been bouncing around articles and podcast discussions for several months now. It joins various other types of -maxxing (sleepmaxxing, studymaxxing, etc.) which refer to an obsessive behaviour, sometimes taken to its extreme. In Jezer-Morton’s version, however, ‘friction-maxxing’ is somewhat softer, more about pushing back on our one-click, next day delivery lifestyles and encouraging more mindful, intentional activities. Examples include using maps instead of GPS, reading books (not summaries!) and doing any number of tasks without turning to AI bots for quick answers.

So far, no major issues – few would disagree we could all do with a little less time on tech, for the most part. However, it’s easy for concepts like these to lose context, and in this case, for “let’s increase friction, because life is too convenient” to slide into unhelpful assumptions and generalisations about experiences in general.

For many students, life is not too convenient. If you’re a first-in-family student navigating an enrolment system that assumes prior knowledge nobody told you, there’s plenty of friction right there. If you’ve commuted two hours to campus, you’re unlikely to experience the morning tutorial discussion as a gentle intellectual warm-up – more like the tail end of an exhausting logistical operation. And for the single parent sitting down to study at 10pm after a full day at work and getting the kids to bed? Telling these students to add more friction to their lives is not a thoughtful provocation; it's assuming privilege where there is none.

Bumps vs. barriers: unequal frictions

Not all friction is created equal. It's worth drawing a distinction between what we might call ‘bumps’ and ‘barriers’. ‘Bumps’ are small hurdles that slow us down, make us think, and in the right context, might even be part of the point; they’re uncomfortable, but you can get over them. ‘Barriers’, on the other hand, are obstacles that don't build resilience or deepen learning, but rather exclude, exhaust, or discourage the people who encounter them. You’ll see both throughout the student journey, and conflating them is where well-intentioned conversations about friction can be unhelpful.

Take the transition into university, for example. Some of the disorientation that comes with starting a degree might reasonably be called ‘bumps’: learning how an institution works, developing your student/ professional identity, figuring out how to engage in class discussions – that temporary uncertainty is part of what it means to enter a new learning community. But when a student can't get a response from an administrative office for three weeks, or when the support services they need have a 6-week waiting list, or the campus doesn't have the facilities to support a disability – that's a barrier, not a rite of passage.

Or consider assessment deadlines: a firm deadline that requires a student to plan their time, resist last-minute shortcuts, and submit work they feel less than certain about? Probably a bump. An inflexible extension policy that takes no account of the student whose hospital shifts changed unexpectedly, or whose housing situation collapsed mid-semester? That's a barrier, and it falls hardest on precisely those students who were already carrying the most.

The distinction matters, because the responses are different. Bumps are often easy enough to smooth when we choose to, and sometimes, as the friction-maxxers would remind us, we might reasonably choose not to. Barriers, on the other hand, tend to be indicators of something deeper: of systems designed, consciously or not, around a particular kind of student. That doesn't mean we throw our hands up — quite the opposite. It means that when we find a barrier, we don’t just ask how we might fix it, but stop and consider what it tells us about who the system was never designed for in the first place.

Choose your friction: Theo and the rescue greyhounds

Which brings us back to Theo, and the fragment of newspaper he helpfully liberated from a pile that had, admittedly, been sitting on the shelf for longer than I'd like to admit.

When we decided to foster greyhounds, we didn't simply turn up and collect a dog. Greyhound Rescue asked for photos of our home, information about who lived in it, our routines, our lifestyle. They wanted to know if we had other pets, small children, a busy household or a quiet one. And then, crucially, they didn't just allocate us whoever happened to be available, they matched us. They read our application, checked it against the dogs and their personalities, and sent us Theodore: a long, lean, sweetly chaotic canine who slotted into our household like he’d lived there all his life. The process has friction built deliberately into it – not to deter people, but to ensure that when a placement is made, it has the best possible chance of becoming permanent.

When the unexpected frictions arrive – and with a greyhound, they do, from the bewildering first night to the creative destruction of your notebook collection – the rescue organisation is there. One-to-one support, thoughtful resources, a warm community of people who have all stood in their kitchen at 11pm wondering why their hound is doing that.

It's a small example, but here is an organisation funded entirely by donations that could, in theory, have streamlined the whole thing. A quick form, a fast match, frictionless delivery of dog to doorstep. Instead, they chose to make it appropriately effortful, and the result is better outcomes for the animals, better-prepared adopters, and if the Facebook group is anything to go by, an extraordinarily devoted community of people who feel that their dog chose them, not the other way around.

That's the thing about friction. It isn't inherently good or bad – it's a question of which friction, for whom, and to what end. A process made more intentional and considered is not the same as a process made unnecessarily hard. And a life with the right kind of texture in it – with books read to their actual endings, or a teacher who stops to check on you after a tutorial, or even a large, affectionate animal redistributing your newspaper archive – is not a worse life. It might even be a richer one.