Friction For Empathy?

The Achilles’ heel of design might just help us create experiences that can foster empathy towards marginalized folks, crucial in the age of AI. I take a closer look at the case of neurodivergence.

Here’s a rhetorical question: what’s the sworn enemy of smooth, delightful experiences? You’ve probably rolled your eyes and thought, well, friction of course. The rough edges — the pause before looking for the checkout button, the extra second the page took to load. Like a sneaky sea urchin buried under the sand, friction’s spikes catch your users off guard and ruin their day, or at the very least, make it significantly more annoying. In the age of AI, it seems eliminating friction has become an even greater goal for our products and services. Our very tolerance to it seems to diminish by the second. After all, if Claude can do anything from draft emails to automate days of work away, why bother with the cognitive tax of doing it yourself?

And so, why am I writing this article to say that friction is essential?

Or rather, why do I make the point that flipping the script, AKA designing intentional experiences where friction is the point, is crucial, especially in the age of AI?

Back in 2021, Sarah Cupples, writing for UX Collective, was talking about how friction can reduce racial bias by prompting us to pause and think before posting on Twitter. She wrote: “meaningful friction works to challenge racial biases in users through triggering more deliberate conscious thought.” In her 2025 Config Talk, Michelle Lee, IDEO, talks about being more deliberate about the experiences we make faster and more efficient. One of the examples she suggests is a map app with a “Discovery mode”, which would trade the default fastest route for one that is more inspirational and whimsical if toggled. I find the careful thinking about how to utilize friction in our everyday services crucial, and believe that these conversations should be more common in our AI-dominated era. However, I would like to take the claim that thoughtful friction can make an experience better one step further: experiences designed around meaningful friction can trigger moments of reflection around lived experiences that aren’t our own. And in a world that grows more fragmented by the second, those pauses might just be one of our best attempts at bridging our divides.

There have been multiple experiments involving the use of friction to create empathy, such as reducing gender violence. I would like to discuss a specific case here: friction for neurodivergent understanding. Constraints can be especially powerful in this instance because being neurodivergent doesn’t simply involve having a different lived reality, but a genuinely different way of processing the same experiences than a neurotypical* person. These experiences can be difficult to understand with description alone.

Designing friction for neurodivergent understanding

Picture a train station at peak hours. The buzzing of a thousand strangers’ conversations all converging in an unintelligible thundercloud in your ears. The distant humming of the engines slowly climbing to an all-encompassing roar. The back-and-forths entering and exiting the compartments, the bright lights, heavy smells, overwhelming textures in a too-large, too-dense, too-noisy crowd.

To a lot of people reading this paragraph, this description may sound overdramatic. Yet, for those with sensory problems, these issues are either things they have to force themselves to ignore — often at a great cost of energy — or things that make crowded spaces with lots of stimuli a classic recipe for an autistic meltdown.

You’re not inconsiderate. If someone gave you this description and explained that seemingly ordinary stimulation (or maybe slightly annoying) can take a heavy toll on some people, you will likely understand it intellectually. But if you do not have a similar experience in your lived reality, your emotional reaction will likely be sympathy. Sympathy and empathy, however, are different — empathy is crucial not only to understanding each other but also to building a world that is more accommodating to other people. Empathy is the experience of the same emotions as others rather than sympathy or pity.

In Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen (2020) argues that a primary function of games is to limit our agency (“intentional action, or action fora reason”) so that we may experience new types of it we might not have encountered on our own. Agency is to games what different stories are to narrative. With careful design, grounding in lived reality, and robust ethical considerations, this meaningful constraint of agency can create playful friction that nudges neurotypical players towards a deeper sense of empathy towards neurodivergent folks.

Example 1: Through My Eyes and the frustration of cognitive load

Understood, a non-profit organization focused on neurodivergence support and education, created a game called Through My Eyes. It uses friction to put the players through everyday experiences of people with ADHD, dyslexia, and other conditions. One of the experiences takes you through a day in Pedro’s life: getting ready for school and staying attentive in class. Pedro is 14, he has ADHD.

The gameplay, narrated by Pedro, is intentionally frustrating: accuracy is difficult, and getting to the checkpoints requires a lot more focus than otherwise required for the tasks presented. This is by design: to make the player experience the frustration of the higher cognitive load and cost of energy for everyday tasks. The experience is also coupled with a longer interview with Pedro and his family, as well as resources for parents and educators.

Example 2: Mismatch and the frustration of misunderstanding

In a live group setting, I have run an experiment to investigate how to create more understanding of people with different communication styles and challenges. I designed Mismatch for a group of 12 college-aged students. Each 4 people are given a different communication constraint, designed to mimic a common neurodivergence challenge. The roles are secret, and should not be revealed to others during the game.

Then, I send them into breakouts of 3 people, where each person has a different communication challenge, and task them with completing puzzles or answering questions together.

After about 7 to 10 minutes, everyone comes back together for a role reveal. We also get to discuss what went well, what was frustrating, and what was memorable. In the session I ran, one comment stood out in the debrief:

“I thought Masha didn’t wanna talk to us”

Masha (pseudonym), it turns out, had the constraint of not being able to speak in her group, only type, which her teammates didn’t know. This is a really powerful moment that led to reflection about the very real challenge of many people who prefer written communication but are misinterpreted as rude, common for autistic people.

Take-aways

Crafting intentional spaces for reflecting on friction is crucial. Otherwise, many of these experiences are simply frustrating puzzles. Through My Eyes does so through linking to longer interviews with the people who inspired the experiences, as well as various educational resources. In Mismatch, I did that through a group debrief and an invitation to carry reflections that emerged in the session beyond its confines.

I am, of course, not making the point that these experiences are perfect, or that venturing into creating games for empathy towards a marginalized group is without its caveats. For instance, it is very easy for the gamified challenges I designed for Mismatch to slip into cheapening a challenge, or reducing it to a one-dimensional issue (hence why the game carried a disclaimer that these challenges are much more complex than presented within the confines of the game). Creating truly positively impactful experiences requires several rounds of iteration, research, testing, as well as the involvement of various experts and the people with the lived reality of that identity.

Friction in an AI-filled world

In a world where each one of us lives deeper inside our carefully designed echo chambers, whether through social media algorithms or AI chatbots reinforcing our biases, asking people to willingly seek friction seems counterintuitive. However, experiences such as the ones discussed here may just be the way we can begin breaking down the misunderstanding walls that divide us without putting the burden on the people who experience the harmful end of those walls.

In the end, the question does beg itself: why not just find a neurodivergent person and ask them questions? There is a tax that comes with recounting painful experiences, and so experiments such as the one discussed here offer a space for people to be ignorant of a lived reality without the marginalized person carrying the toll of that ignorance. They are, however, no substitute for conversations with real people whose experiences are widely varied and go beyond any designed experience could capture. And so, I propose that these experiences be a stepping stone into the greatest friction of them all: listening to the people who are different when they are talking about things that they find difficult in their lives. Let them tell you their story. Let the experiences be an exercise, and the real world the true game.

“Neurodivergent” and “neurotypical” are words I use to refer to ends of a spectrum rather than absolute categories.

References

BeAnotherLab. (n.d.). The Machine to Be Another: Embodied virtual reality system. https://beanotherlab.org/home/work/tmtba/

Cupples, S. (2021). Friction can reduce racial bias. UX Collective. https://uxdesign.cc/friction-can-reduce-racial-bias-58e7fbc0f6ec

Harvard Health Publishing. (n.d.). What does it mean to be neurodivergent? Harvard Medical School. https://www.health.harvard.edu/

Lee, M. (2025). Config 2025: Designing for play and friction in a fast-paced world [Conference talk]. IDEO. https://www.ideo.com/playlab

National Autistic Society. (2020, August 20). Meltdowns. https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/behaviour/meltdowns

Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as art. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/32137

Understood. (n.d.). Through My Eyes™. https://www.understood.org/en/through-my-eyes

Understood. (n.d.). Understood: For learning and thinking differences. https://www.understood.org/

Alaoui, S. (n.d.). Mismatch [Interactive experience]. https://alaouisalma.framer.website/

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