There’s something I hear all the time, and when I say all the time - I damn mean it!

“Good UX means fewer clicks.”

I’m not sure where that came from, but whenever it comes up, I nearly always share my screen and buy something on Amazon.

That ain’t three clicks.

Booking a holiday isn’t three clicks. Buying most things isn’t three clicks, and that’s absolutely fine.

Clicking three times isn’t good UX. Clicking ten times isn’t bad UX.

What matters is clicking with purpose and getting the job done correctly the first time.

100 clicks or 1, nobody cares as long as they’ve completed what they needed to do and don’t have to go backwards fixing things.

And sometimes I’ll deliberately add another click.

Deleting something is a good example.

I work with users who move FAST. They’ve got deadlines, two screens, 15 tabs open, Teams pinging, the radio on, and they want to get home for dinner.

Then they click delete.

Technically, they’ve told us exactly what they want to do, but if that thing can’t easily be recovered, I want to slow them down - just for a second.

“Are you sure you want to delete this? This cannot be undone.”

I often call this “protecting the user from themselves”.

And that normally seals the deal when I’m arguing for it. It’s not there because we think users are stupid or don’t understand what delete means, it’s there because they’re human.

They’re busy. They get distracted. They work quickly. And sometimes the thing they’re doing in our service isn’t even the most important part of their job.

A one-off pause isn’t the end of the world.

If that extra friction makes them safer, I’m absolutely fine with it.

But there’s another side to this.

In the past I’ve worked on a flow where an admin could see a password only once. After leaving the screen, seeing it again meant resetting it.

The first time they do that, absolutely tell them and make sure they understand the rule.

But do we need to stop an experienced admin and tell them the same thing every single time they create another user?

They know.

At that point we’re not protecting them. We’re just getting in their way.

That’s the difference for me.

Some friction teaches.

Some friction protects.

And sometimes friction has done its job and needs to get out of the way.

I’m much less interested these days in how many clicks a journey takes.

I care whether someone understands what’s happening, can get the job done correctly first time and doesn’t have to come back and fix it afterwards.

Sometimes good design gets out of the way.

And sometimes good design says:

Hang on a second. Are you sure?