I've Spent 10 Years Removing Friction. Now I'm Putting It Back.

There's a rule in UX that gets repeated so often it becomes reflex: remove friction. Make it fast. Make it easy. If a user has to think, you've already failed. I've spent over a decade working to that principle. Onboarding flows, signup screens, checkout funnels, all of it stripped down, made effortless, invisible.

I was good at it. And somewhere along the way I started to wonder if we were all building the wrong thing.

What "Frictionless" Actually Built

Look at what frictionless design created at scale. Signing up for a social media account takes thirty seconds. No verification, no friction, nothing to slow you down. That same ease that makes it simple for a real person to join also makes it trivial for someone to create ten thousand fake accounts before lunch.

The platforms weren't naive. They knew. But friction reduction was always framed as a user experience win, and user experience wins meant growth, and growth meant everything. So the friction kept coming out, and everything kept getting in.

The result is the internet we have now. Bots outnumbering humans. Feeds full of AI-generated content. Engagement metrics that mean nothing because half the engagement isn't real. A space optimised so aggressively for ease that it stopped being worth using.

We removed every barrier and got exactly what you'd expect. A room with no door policy, and no control over who's in the room.

The Friction That Has Value

Here's the thing about friction that the UX playbook doesn't cover. Not all friction is bad. The right friction, in the right place, for the right reason, creates something that pure ease never can: trust.

Think about the things you value in the physical world. The restaurant you have to book three weeks in advance. The event that sells out because the number of seats is genuinely limited. The community that takes time to join because the people who are already in it take it seriously. That friction doesn't diminish the value. It creates it.

The small effort required to enter is exactly what makes being inside mean something.

What Hi Friction Does Differently

Hi Friction asks users to verify they're human. Not once, at signup, and then never again. Continuously. Periodic challenges pushed to your phone. A liveness check when you join. Behavioural monitoring running quietly in the background. A vouching system where real people stand behind new members. A Human Score that grows the longer you show up as a real person.

By every conventional UX measure, this is bad design. More steps. More interruptions. More effort.

By the measure that actually matters, it's the best design decision I've made. Because when a user sees a post on Hi Friction, they know a human wrote it. When they connect with someone, they know that person is real. That's not a feature. That's the foundation.

Unlearning the Rule

The rule isn't wrong in most contexts. Unnecessary friction is still bad design. But the word "unnecessary" is doing a lot of work there, and the UX industry has spent twenty years undervaluing it.

Friction that keeps the real out: bad. Friction that keeps the fake out: good. Friction that signals to every user that what they're part of is genuine, verified, worth protecting: essential.

I spent a decade making things easy. Hi Friction is what happens when you ask whether easy is actually the point.