Over roughly the past decade and a half, the dominant design logic of consumer technology has been to remove friction. Not friction in the engineering sense, but in the experiential sense: the small delays, minor inconveniences, and brief pauses that once punctuated ordinary daily life. The gap while a page loaded. The moment of deciding which of three buttons to press. The three-second wait between asking a question and receiving an answer. These things were treated, by the companies building platforms and the designers working within them, as problems. Irritants. Things to be optimised away in pursuit of seamless, frictionless experience.
We are writers, not clinicians. What follows is reading and observation, not professional guidance.
The research emerging from cognitive psychology over the same period tells a more complicated story. A body of work, across several research groups, suggests that some of what was removed in the name of frictionlessness was not merely inconvenience. Some of it was the kind of low-level mental effort that appears to support attention, consolidate memory, and allow the mind to do the slower, quieter work that engagement-optimised surfaces are specifically designed to interrupt.
What the research actually says
The most directly relevant line of work concerns what psychologists call “desirable difficulties.” The term was introduced by Robert Bjork at UCLA, whose research on memory and learning has examined how certain types of difficulty, when introduced into the learning process, improve long-term retention even while they slow immediate performance. The finding, which has been replicated across a range of experimental settings, is counterintuitive on its face: making something slightly harder to process can make it stick better. Bjork’s work has focused primarily on educational contexts, but the underlying principle, that the mind consolidates information more thoroughly when it has to work for it, has attracted wider attention.
A related strand comes from research into mind-wandering. Malia Mason and colleagues published a study in Science in 2007 documenting that the brain’s default mode network, the set of regions that become more active during unfocused thought, is associated with spontaneous, self-generated mental activity: planning, reflection, the kind of loose associative thinking that people sometimes describe as having an idea in the shower. The conditions under which this kind of processing tends to occur are conditions of low external demand. Waiting. Walking without a destination. Sitting with nothing to do. These are precisely the conditions that smartphone design has most thoroughly colonised.
More recently, research published in Computers in Human Behavior in 2015, found that participants who were instructed to keep their phones nearby and check them frequently reported higher levels of inattention and what they described as “hyperactivity” compared to those instructed to check less often. The study was limited in scope and self-reported, and Kushlev and Dunn were careful about the conclusions they drew. But the direction of the finding has since appeared, in various forms, in the broader literature on attention and device use.
The design logic that got us here
None of this happened by accident, or through simple carelessness. The companies that built the dominant platforms of the past fifteen years were following a coherent internal logic. In the attention economy, engagement is the product. Time spent on platform is the metric. Every piece of friction that caused a user to pause, reconsider, or simply stop and look up was, from that perspective, a leak in the system.
The pull-to-refresh gesture, which mimics a slot machine lever, is documented in its origins: the designer Loren Brichter, who invented it for the Tweetie app in 2009, has in interviews described his later ambivalence about it. Infinite scroll, which removed the natural stopping point of pagination, was designed by Aza Raskin, who has since spoken publicly about its costs. These are not secret histories. The designers involved have, in many cases, given detailed accounts of what they built and why they now see it differently.
What is less often examined is what exactly was displaced when the friction was removed. Not the extreme cases, which attract most of the commentary, but the ordinary daily texture: the moment of boredom that used to occur in a queue, the brief blankness between finishing one task and starting another, the ten-minute stretch on public transport where there was simply nothing to look at. These were, by any engagement metric, wasted time. They were also, the research suggests, doing something.
Boredom as a cognitive state
The psychology of boredom has attracted serious research attention in the past decade. Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman at the University of Central Lancashire published a study in 2014 in the journal Creativity Research Journal finding that participants who performed a tedious task before a creative challenge outperformed those who went directly to the creative task. The boring task appeared to increase divergent thinking, the kind of associative, generative cognition associated with problem-solving and creative work. The proposed mechanism was that boredom encourages mind-wandering, and mind-wandering draws on the same default-mode processing described in Mason’s earlier work.
The study was small, and Mann and Cadman were clear about its limitations. It has not been taken as a settled result. But it sits within a pattern of findings that points in a consistent direction: the mind in a passive, undirected state is not necessarily a mind doing nothing. It is doing something less visible, and the conditions that support it are increasingly rare in an environment designed around continuous stimulation.
The memory question
There is a separate but related concern about memory and cognitive offloading. A paper in Science in 2011 examined the so-called “Google effect.” Their experiments found that when people expected information to be available later via a search engine, they were less likely to remember the information itself, and more likely to remember where to find it. The researchers were careful not to overstate the implications. Cognitive offloading to external tools is not new, and there are reasonable arguments that it allows cognitive resources to be deployed elsewhere.
What is less clear is whether those resources are, in practice, being deployed elsewhere, or whether they are being absorbed by the next notification, the next scroll, the next small demand from a surface that has been designed to generate exactly that kind of small demand continuously. The Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner finding was about search engines specifically. The question of what happens to memory and attention in an environment of pervasive, frictionless, always-available information retrieval is still being worked out.
What has actually changed, and what remains uncertain
It is worth being precise about what can and cannot be claimed here. The research on desirable difficulties, mind-wandering, boredom, and the Google effect is real and serious. It is also, in important ways, incomplete. Most of the studies on attention and device use rely on self-report measures, have been conducted over short timeframes, or involve specific behaviours in controlled settings that may not translate cleanly to everyday life. The causal questions, specifically whether technology-driven friction removal has produced measurable long-term changes in how people attend, remember, and think, are harder to answer than the correlational ones.
What can be said with more confidence is that the design choices of the past fifteen years were not neutral with respect to cognitive experience. They were made in pursuit of specific outcomes, primarily engagement, and they achieved those outcomes. The separate question of what those outcomes cost is one the research is only beginning to address systematically.
There are signs that some product designers are now taking this seriously. Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has been publicly making the case for what he calls “time well spent” for several years. Apple introduced Screen Time in 2018. Various apps now offer friction-restoring features: timers, usage limits, deliberate delays before opening certain applications. Whether these function as meaningful countermeasures or as reassurance features that leave the underlying design logic untouched is a different question, and one that does not yet have a research consensus behind it.
A quieter point
The framing of this as a problem to be solved by better product design probably misses something. The conditions that supported the kind of mental activity the research describes, the boredom, the waiting, the undirected stretch of time, were not themselves products. They were gaps in the world that have now been filled. Whether they can be deliberately recreated, or whether they require a different kind of relationship to the filling, is a question that goes beyond interface design.
If what you are reading here matches something heavier you are carrying about your own attention or mental health, a GP or licensed therapist will be more useful than an article.
The researchers whose work is described here were, for the most part, not studying technology. They were studying attention, memory, boredom, and mind-wandering, and the technology question entered later, as observers noticed that the conditions their research described were changing. That sequence is worth holding onto. The research was not produced to critique an industry. It described how minds work. The industry happened to build something that works against some of what was described.
