Glossary Terms
Cognitive friction
The extra mental effort a person spends on your site, making them hesitate or give up.
Cognitive friction is the extra mental effort a person has to spend to keep going on your site. You see it when visitors hesitate, abandon a form, or stop partway through a lesson. Usually nothing is obviously broken; the next step just feels harder than it should. Reducing friction isn't about dumbing the ideas down, it's about making the next move feel obvious. A concrete example: a checkout form that asks for a phone number with no explanation of why, right before the pay button. Nothing there is broken, but the visitor has to stop and decide whether answering is safe, and some percentage quietly close the tab instead of asking. The fix is rarely a redesign. It's removing or explaining the one thing that made someone pause, one field or one sentence at a time, and watching whether completion improves before moving to the next one.
Nothing here yet.