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Prototyping with intentional friction

Documenting a design exercise where I slowed interactions to surface better product questions.

Most experiments I run focus on speed, but this round I tried the opposite—introducing small pauses to surface missing context. The prototype layered a two-step confirmation across the dashboard editor:

  1. ask the user to narrate why they were editing a metric
  2. require them to tag the change with the downstream stakeholder that would care

It turns out the extra 10 seconds prevented half-baked edits from landing in production, and the captured rationale made the weekly review far easier. I still care about polish, but this reminded me that “fast” and “thoughtful” are not opposites—there is a middle lane where friction protects momentum.