Experience Design Thinking
Friction is a strategy problem wearing a small disguise
February 2026, 5 min read
When a workflow takes four clicks too many, the cost is not time. It is the quiet signal that the new way of working was not designed for the person doing it.
Leaders tend to hear about friction as an annoyance metric: a workflow takes too many clicks, a form asks for the same information twice, an approval chain adds three days. Each instance sounds small. Aggregate them, and you get the most reliable leading indicator I know for whether a transformation will stick, because friction is not a usability issue. It is evidence about who the change was designed for.
When a new process is hard to use, it tells the person doing it something precise: this was designed around an org chart, a system boundary, or a vendor's data model, not around you. People rarely say this out loud. They say it behaviorally, by keeping the spreadsheet, by walking the form to someone's desk, by rebuilding the old process inside the new tool.
Parallel processes are a design review
In a financial services rollout I worked on, the organization measured adoption through logins, and logins looked fine. What the metric hid was that teams logged in, exported the data, and did the actual work exactly as before. The new platform had become an expensive filing cabinet. Sixty-eight percent of the parallel legacy activity we found traced back to just three friction points, each under two minutes long.
Two minutes sounds trivial until you multiply it by the real cost: the daily, felt reminder that the 'future of work' is slightly worse than the past. Friction doesn't just waste time. It spends trust, every single day, in small denominations that never appear on a program dashboard.
Where to look
If you want to know how your transformation is really going, don't start with the survey. Watch one person in each key role do the new process end to end, and count the moments they sigh, switch tools, or say 'the trick is.' Those moments are your strategy gap, rendered at human scale. Remove the three worst ones and you will move adoption more than any communication campaign can, because you will have changed the signal the design sends: this was built for you.