Intentional Interaction

The best interaction experiences make you pause and think, creating a moment of intentional awareness before you commit to doing something.

Not all friction is bad. When actions carry real consequences—making payments, deleting data, or authorizing recurring charges—a single accidental tap can cause significant damage. Swipe-to-confirm gestures transform quick taps into deliberate motions that engage multiple cognitive systems: your motor cortex sustains the gesture, your visual system tracks progress feedback, and your prefrontal cortex gets crucial seconds to process what you're actually doing^[1]. This 1-2 second window enables consequence awareness, giving users time to verify amounts, confirm recipients, or reconsider deletions before completion.

The effectiveness lies in calibration. The gesture must be easy enough for intentional use but hard enough to prevent accidents, creating meaningful engagement without frustrating legitimate actions. This pattern should live only where genuine consequences exist—applying it everywhere dilutes its protective power and trains users to mindlessly swipe through important decisions^[2]. When used thoughtfully for payments, deletions, and irreversible actions, intentional interaction becomes an elegant safeguard that helps users take the right actions with full awareness of their choices.