Minimalist phones are supposed to help us disconnect. But what if the friction they introduce works for some people and not others? Drawing on Neta Alexander's Interface Frictions and his own experience with a minimalist phone, Alex explores why digital wellbeing may be built around an imagined "average disconnector".
My minimalist phone is supposed to be helping.
It is slower than a smartphone, less distracting, and more deliberate. Every design decision seems intended to create a little more friction between me and the internet. Yet after months of experimenting with minimalist devices, I keep returning to a strange conclusion: in some situations, my minimalist phone feels less like a tool for self-discovery and more like a mask.
That experience has made me think differently about a concept that is having a moment in debates about digital wellbeing: friction.
Across debates about social media, digital wellbeing, and platform regulation, researchers and policymakers are increasingly arguing that digital technologies have become too efficient. Infinite scroll, autoplay, personalised feeds, and algorithmic recommendations create online environments that are remarkably good at capturing and holding our attention. If these systems contribute to compulsive use, distraction, and misinformation, then perhaps the answer is simple. Add friction. Introduce more pauses, more prompts, and more opportunities to reflect before clicking.
The argument is appealing right? More pauses, more prompts, and more opportunities to reflect before acting seem like sensible correctives to a digital environment optimised for engagement.
Alexander's book examines how digital technologies are often designed around an imagined "average user" whose needs, abilities, habits, and ways of navigating the world are treated as normal. Features that appear seamless and intuitive for some users can create barriers for others. By focusing on disabled or “non-average” users, she shows how technologies that present themselves as universal often depend on very particular assumptions about bodies and minds.
Alexander develops this argument through a series of seemingly mundane features and functionalities, including autoplay, playback-speed controls, refresh buttons, recommendation systems, streaming platforms, and night modes. What appears at first glance to be a collection of neutral design choices becomes, in her hands, a way of uncovering the assumptions built into digital technologies. These interfaces do not simply organise information. They privilege particular ways of seeing, paying attention, navigating, remembering, and engaging with the world.
Her most important insight is that friction is never experienced equally. For some people, friction is a design intervention waiting to be introduced. For others, it is already an everyday reality.
When friction feels wrong
This question has become especially important in my own research with adults with ADHD, where digital disconnection rarely presents itself as a simple choice between being online and offline. Notifications can be distracting, but they can also function as essential reminders. Calendars can become overwhelming, but they can also provide much-needed structure. Messaging platforms can create interruptions, but they can also support accountability, coordination, and connection.
The challenge is often not how to disconnect completely. The challenge is deciding what can be disconnected from without losing something important in return.
This becomes particularly visible when we look at technologies that intentionally build friction into everyday communication. Consider the growing popularity of minimalist phones such as Mudita. These devices are designed to be slower and less seamless than smartphones. Communication is more constrained, tasks take longer, and distraction is reduced. The friction is the point.
My Mudita phone, which I both love and hate. Rather like a smartphone, but for entirely different reasons.
To be clear, my experience with minimalist phones has not been entirely negative. Since moving away from my smartphone, I read more before bed. The absence of apps, notifications, and temptations creates space for books to re-enter evenings that might otherwise dissolve into scrolling. That feels meaningful (and yes very morally superior to you, dear doom-scrolling reader). It is one of the few areas where the minimalist phone has done exactly what it promised.
Then again, technologies have a habit of leaking into whatever spaces we create for them. I have also noticed myself wandering around the house carrying my laptop, replacing some forms of phone use with computer use. Digital disconnection is rarely as straightforward as removing a device. Habits migrate. The internet finds another surface. I am no disconnecting savant.
Still, what really frustrates me is texting. The Mudita SUCKS for messaging and it's made me realize that some of my digital relationships are built around fast, layered communication. On a smartphone (particularly Whatsapp), I might be juggling two or three conversations at once, switching between friends, colleagues, and family members while exchanging emojis, GIFs, links, screenshots, and half-finished thoughts. With some people, there are even multiple conversations unfolding simultaneously across the same chat. It is chaotic. It is probably not optimal. But it is also how some of my relationships work. I love it.
On a minimalist phone, that rhythm changes dramatically. Typing takes longer. Switching between conversations takes longer. Everything becomes slower and more deliberate. It rarely feels refreshing. More often, it feels constraining. The issue is not simply that communication becomes slower. It is that I can no longer communicate in ways that feel authentic to me. The fast-talking, slightly chaotic, emoji-laden version of myself starts to disappear.
In that sense, my minimalist phone does not simply reduce distraction. It masks me.
The myth of the average disconnector
Reflecting on my own frustrations with the Mudita, I began wondering whether digital wellbeing research has its own version of Alexander’s “average user”.
If so, it might be what we could call the average disconnector. Or perhaps the average digital detoxer or non-user (I am still workshopping the terminology).
This imagined person would probably love my minimalist phone. They benefit from slower communication. They welcome fewer notifications. They enjoy the additional friction. Their aesthetic is probably beige or neutral whites. Connection itself is largely experienced as a burden, so reducing it feels like a relief. The average disconnector can put their phone away, delete social media, spend a weekend offline, and return feeling refreshed.
Of course, people like this exist. Many of us become this person from time to time. The problem arises when the average disconnector starts to look universal or is positioned as aspirational.
Disconnection is not distributed evenly. Some people can disconnect with relatively little cost. Others rely on digital technologies to manage work, relationships, memory, organisation, accessibility, and everyday life. The ability to disconnect depends on far more than willpower. It is shaped by social circumstances, workplace expectations, infrastructure, bodies, and minds.
This is why the minimalist phone is such a useful object to think with. For one imagined user, its slowness is the solution. For another, that same slowness creates new problems. A device designed to reduce distraction may simultaneously disrupt forms of communication, organisation, or connection that some people find valuable.
Seen this way, the question is not whether friction works. The question is which frictions work for whom, under what circumstances, and at what cost.
Beyond the Average Disconnector
Calls to disconnect, reduce screen time, or slow down digital life often sound universal but they also imagine a particular kind of user. Much like interface designers can overlook the non-average user, digital wellbeing researchers can overlook the non-average disconnector.
Alexander argues that the margins often reveal what the center takes for granted. Extending that insight into digital disconnection suggests that people who struggle to fit dominant models of digital wellbeing are not simply exceptions to the rule. They are often the people best positioned to reveal the hidden assumptions built into those rules.
My minimalist phone has helped me in some ways. It has made my evenings quieter and reading easier. But it has also shown me that friction is never neutral. Sometimes it opens space and other times it closes down a way of being with others.
If Alexander asks us to take non-average users seriously, perhaps digital disconnection research should begin taking non-average disconnectors seriously too. Not because they sit at the margins of digital wellbeing debates, but because they help us see the center more clearly.
