What building a low-friction browser game portal taught me about web UX

If you build for short sessions, every bit of friction shows up immediately. That became obvious while working on Cookie Clicker 2, a browser-first portal focused on idle and incremental games. People do not open this kind of site the same way they open a long-form app. They arrive with almost no setup tolerance. They want the page to load fast, the game to be obvious, and the next action to feel effortless. That constraint ended up being useful. It forced a few product and engineering decisions that I think apply far beyond game sites. 1. Speed matters more when the session is optional A lot of products can survive a slow first impression because the user has already committed to a task. Browser games do not get that luxury. When someone opens a quick-play site during a short break, they are not deeply invested yet. If the page is slow, cluttered, or unclear, they leave before the product has a chance to explain itself. That pushed me toward a simpler rule: optimize for time-to-value,