Why the best UX often disappears. And when it shouldn’t
The paradox of “forgettable” design
“Make the experience forgettable,” a senior business leader once told me.
That might sound like a joke to a designer who prides himself on creating memorable moments. But as the head of airport operations, he was dead serious.
Singapore Airlines handles thousands of travellers every day. For these passengers, joy comes from the in-flight experience and on-time departures. The last thing the operations team wants is for a customer to get stuck in a long queue or hit a snag like a failed boarding pass, only to face their wrath and complaints.
At the airport, smooth is invisible. One reason Changi Airport remains among the best in the world is its relentless investment in removing friction.
State-of-the-art passport-less immigration clearance was once thought impossible. Today, Singapore residents and eligible travellers simply walk through automated gantries without whipping out their passports. Within 10 to 30 seconds, they pass through customs, making their experiences at other airports feel jarring by comparison.
Ultimately, the goal is for the airport experience to be completely forgettable.
The three faces of friction
You can see this pattern everywhere. Nobody falls in love with banking; you just want your bank to safeguard your money so you can live your life. That’s why banks like DBS strive to make banking invisible.
Or consider choosing a school for your child. No parent wants to deal with stacks of paper forms or jump through extra hoops just because they fit into an edge-case category. They want a seamless system that gives them immediate peace of mind.
In UX design, friction is anything that slows a user down, prevents them from accomplishing their goal, or causes mental frustration. It usually shows up in three ways:
- Interaction friction: The physical effort required to complete a task, such as five-page checkouts when two steps would do, redundant fields, or tiny, tightly packed buttons on mobile.
- Cognitive friction: The mental tax of a confusing interface; buried navigation, cryptic labels, or layouts that stray so far from familiar patterns that users pause and think, “What do I click next?”
- Emotional friction: The rise in anxiety, annoyance, or mistrust triggered by a poor experience, surprise fees at the end, or apps demanding intrusive permissions before offering clear value.
When these micro-frustrations compound, users give up. They abandon their steps, close the tab, or uninstall the app. So the primary directive of modern product design, like airlines, banks, and schools, has long been to smooth out the digital road, eliminating unnecessary steps and making actions feel effortless.
When frictionless becomes too easy
More recently, the frontier of frictionless design has moved into AI workflows. Platforms like ChatGPT and Claude have made prompting with text, images, or documents so effortless that users get results in seconds. Like a digital genie, modern LLMs can grasp user intent from minimal input. Users keep returning because the experience feels smooth, intuitive, and immediately rewarding.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: if AI can remove friction from simple tasks, why not from everything helping someone grasp abstract math, build software, or expand a few bullet points into a full essay?
AI can feel like a silver bullet that removes friction from everything. And that, in itself, can become a slippery slope.
Beneath this frictionless ideal lies a business model built on continuous consumption. The smoother the experience, the more we prompt, the more compute we consume, and the more tokens are spent. But when we optimise entirely for instant output over intentional effort, we trade deep, rigorous thinking for a fast, superficial result.