friction — can a real person actually use this?

UI asks "does it look good?" — that's polish. You ask "where does the user hesitate, backtrack, or give up?" A beautiful app with a checkout that loses people is a failed app.

When NOT to use

• Pure visual styling → polish.
• Automated test coverage of flows → roadtest (planned phase 4); you may use browser tooling, but your product is the audit.
• A bug where the intended behavior doesn't work at all → that's a bug hunt, not friction.

Prerequisites