Coaching practices for App Friction

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For App Friction, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My thumb finds the same two apps and opens them before I even know I picked up the phone
• I open the same feed without even deciding to, and an hour’s gone before I notice
• My thumb opens the app before I’ve even decided to
• I unlock my phone to do one quick thing and my thumb has already tapped the app before my brain catches up
• The escape is one tap away and so frictionless that I’m three videos deep before I even realize I caved

Practices that may help

1. Increase friction on high-capture apps
   Add steps between you and the apps most likely to capture you — every additional tap reduces automatic use.
   Grayscale Phone Mode and Behavioral Design
2. Tame the Infinity Pools
   Add friction to bottomless apps — news feeds, email, video — so they stop hijacking attention.
   Make Time, Made Practical
3. Add friction to attention-capture apps
   Increase the effort required to open distracting apps so the default path is not the lowest-resistance one.
   The Attention Economy: Reclaiming Your Focus from Systems Designed to Capture It
4. Remove all social and news triggers from your home screen
   Make the highest-capture apps invisible on your phone’s first screen — requiring deliberate navigation to reach them.
   Defending Your Attention in the Attention Economy
5. Use effort pacts
   Add friction that makes distraction harder to slip into without thinking.
   Indistractable, Made Practical
6. Remove social and entertainment app icons from the home screen
   Move high-pull apps off the home screen so opening them requires a deliberate search rather than a tap.
   Notification Detox
7. Design defaults so the cheap reward is not one tap away
   Make the high-stimulation input harder to reach than the activity you want.
   Dopamine Detox, Honestly Explained
8. Add friction to unwanted behaviors
   Inserting even a small obstacle between you and an unwanted behavior meaningfully reduces how often it happens.
   Environment Design for Behavior Change
9. Audit and redesign your digital environment
   Your phone and computer are designed by engineers optimizing for your attention — audit them as you would a physical space.
   Environment Design for Behavior Change
10. Strip out the attention-capturing features
    Keep the tool, remove the slot-machine parts: feeds, likes, autoplay, and notifications.
    Digital Minimalism, Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.