One of my jobs is as a computer toucher for a shitty company that makes website and if there is one thing everyone is constantly enthused about it is "reducing friction". If we're not "innovating for the customer" (making website worse) we're "reducing friction". Gotta provide a frictionless experience, gotta shorten that pipeline.
It's not always a good thing!
When we talk about UX, we talk about affordances. Exposing Things The User Can Do and How To Do Them. Affordances are frequently held up as the opposite of friction, but that breaks down under inspection, and everyone knows it. Affordances are often sources of friction, and that's a good thing because it gives people control.
Think about buying something online. What is the most "frictionless" possible experience? Well, something Amazon pretty notoriously patented years ago, "one-click buying", comes close. You don't need to do anything, you don't get any feedback, you just push a single button and bam, you bought something. The problems with this are obvious! You could make it even more frictionless if the site just decided to charge you and send you something, and that's obviously bad. In this case, affordances like "letting the user see the price of something before they click buy" or "letting them choose which address something should go to" are pretty important, but those increase friction.
There's so much friction in our lives that we absolutely take for granted. Your phone ringing or vibrating to let you know someone's calling is friction! You have to take an action to accept the call. Your car needing a key to start is friction, and it's essential to keep people from taking off with your car. Same with your front door lock (you know, to keep people from stealing your house).
In software, friction is not addressed well. We hide behind "reasonable defaults" and "intuitiveness" instead of admitting that we basically don't give a fuck about the users or at least don't want to think about them when there's more important (fun and/or pocket-lining) problems to solve. Hamburger menus are an obvious place where friction could be reduced in many cases, simply by not having them and having options facing out instead like normal menus. They're not intuitive to use in any sense. When they were invented, and when used appropriately, they're a compromise for mobile screens and in that sense an affordance, because the options are all awkward (see Cohost pre-upper left menu) but they have no place on the desktop and even many mobile applications misapply them and they become needless friction. And we create that all the time. We create friction to make it hard for people to not give us money/data/their time and energy, and we try to get rid of as many affordances as possible that would let them control doing the same.
Friction is often good because users being able to control shit is good.
