Add deliberate friction as a feature when your users want to be restricted from their own behavior
For products targeting self-control and behavior change, making the product harder to bypass is the core value proposition. Deliberately engineer friction that prevents users from easily disabling restrictions they set for themselves. This inverts the typical UX principle of removing friction — for self-restriction tools, difficulty IS the feature.
When to use
When building tools for self-imposed restrictions, addiction recovery, focus management, or any use case where users want to limit their own future behavior
Don't do this
Making content blockers or restriction tools easy to disable, which defeats the purpose for users who set restrictions precisely because they lack willpower
1 Founder Who Did This
Built bypass prevention as the core differentiator: VPN blocking, app deletion prevention, profile locking, and configuration generators that make filters deliberately hard to undo. Positioned against traditional parental controls that are easy to circumvent.