How To Build Frictionless Products

TLDR; What is a Product Friction Evaluation?

A Product Friction Evaluation is a team exercise that identifies points of friction along a user journey and crowdsources ideas to make a product easier, faster, and more delightful to use.

During the workshop teams review and rate all the tasks a user may complete to accomplish their goal. If a step is rated to be difficult based on what a user feels, thinks or does, then a “How might we” is added by the rater to highlight a opportunity to fix it — this statement conveniently doubles as a user story to kick-start the design process or drive further research.

Total workshop time: 1–2 hours
Resources: GSlide and Figjam workshop templates

Why I love this exercise

Over the course of my career I’ve led dozens of creative exercises and workshops to help teams align, collaborate, and develop product strategy. And of all the artifacts produced throughout the creative lifecycle, I’ve found user flows to be the most critical in helping people understand, “What are we building and why?”

The storyboard format of a user journey is visual, succinct, and plays like a movie… each task is a scene, we observe the protagonist struggle and grow in the face of challenges, and in the end they accomplish something meaningful.

The Product Friction Evaluation is a type of journey mapping exercise that enables teams to evaluate a user’s story end-to-end as a funnel. It helps teams navigate the ambiguity of the discovery and definition phase of the creative lifecycle to define product strategy and prioritize requirements, because the ROI from good UX becomes plain to see.

How is this workshop different from others?

The Product Friction Evaluation is a Zoom-friendly workshop that blends multiple design thinking exercises together, most notably PURE (Pragmatic Usability Rating by Experts).

It can be used to measure any product experience, doesn’t require a lot of up front user research, garners team alignment, produces constructive tactical outcomes, and only takes 1–2 hours.

During the exercise teams are oriented around a user and each task they must complete to accomplish their objective, and mark opportunities that would accelerate the user’s time to value.

Task success, the speed at which users can complete an activity with confidence, is critical in driving product adoption, retention, and advocacy. If tasks are easy to accomplish then users will be more likely to build sustained habits with a product.

In other words, PFE can help tighten Habit Loops, make “Aha Moments” easier to reach, and increase Product-Led Growth.

How does it work?

To identify points of friction along a user journey, workshop facilitators need to provide participants with a job to be done, a user scenario, and a screenshot flow detailing every decision (click or tap) a user makes to complete their tasks and accomplish their goal.

Setup for the workshop doesn’t require specialization — anyone can do it!

👉 Here’s a Figjam workshop template to help you get started.

Step 1 — Identify a Job To Be Done

The first thing that needs to be settled is the Job To Be Done — the primary reason someone would “employ” your product. Maintaining focus on the Job To Be Done vs isolated tasks enables teams to consider the user’s end-to-end journey, which may involve other products and services. Doing so will help teams consider opportunities and synergies to optimize the entirety of a user’s workflow and further differentiate your solution.

For example, I used Notion to draft this article. However, my goal wasn’t to draft an article, it was to publish one. Drafting the article was one of many tasks along my journey to achieve the goal.

As a design leader at a software company, I need to write, format and publish articles, so I can share ideas that have helped my team.

Step 2 — Define a user scenario

Who the user is and their motivations, needs, limitations, and past experience will shape their expectations and decision making process using your product. For example, if a user is familiar with a competitive product they may experience greater cognitive load if your product works differently.

If you have personas, pick one and base your scenario off of it. Otherwise, define one yourself with the information you have on hand. The definition of your target user doesn’t need to be perfect, it only needs to provide your team with a lens in which to view their journey.

Example persona

I’ve found it most helpful to evaluate the first time user experience. Teams are often so familiar with their product that they unconsciously overlook: areas where the product isn’t guiding, confusing information architecture, non-standard interaction patterns, and workarounds.

Example “Job To Be Done” scenario

Step 3 — Map the user flow

There are seven general stages in a user journey:

1. Awareness — Prospective users discover your product exists.
2. Consideration — Prospective users learn more about your product.
3. Evaluation — Trial users test your product and compare with their existing solution.
4. Purchase — Users convert to customers.
5. Onboarding — Users learn more about product capabilities and how to best use it (may happen prior to purchase).
6. Retention — Users continue to engage with your product with frequency.
7. Advocacy — Users invite, champion, or recommend your product to others.

You may define your users’ journey differently, but it’s helpful to remember that they always start as strangers and should mature to advocates.

It’s also ok to omit stages if you feel they aren’t worth evaluating. For example, if your goal is to review a product experience, you might exclude preceding marketing or e-commerce conversion flows.

Lastly, you may want to only focus on the happiest, simplest, or most likely path a user would take to complete their objective. Evaluating less common paths and error scenarios will increase overall effort.

How to map a flow

1. Add screenshots — Choose a starting point and take screenshots of each decision and click/tap required to complete the job to be done.
2. Add descriptions — Include a sentence describing what the user is doing at each step in the flow as it might not be obvious with a static image.
3. Add task sections — Once all the steps have been captured, chunk the flow into discrete tasks and add an avatar to each task section to indicate who’s involved.
4. Add details — (Optional) Tag specific steps in the flow to call out “Aha movements” or relevant insights (e.g. user quotes or click flow data) to better equip participants to evaluate the user journey.

Running the workshop

Part 1 — Independent Evaluation

Participants are to spend the first half of the workshop reviewing the user scenario and flow independently. The idea is for them to put on the lens of the user and take a walk in their shoes.

During the independent evaluation, direct participants to internalize an empathy mapping exercise and rate each step.

“Ask yourself, ‘What would the user say, think, feel, or do at each step?’ And based on these considerations, rate on a scale of 1–3 how difficult it would be for the user to complete it and move forward.”

If a step is rated as a 2 or 3, direct participants to add a “How Might We” comment. I find HMW statements do a great job at highlighting the problem and opportunity in the most succinct way. They can also double as a user story and be repurposed in a product spec.

Part 2 — Group Discussion

After everyone has had an opportunity to complete their evaluation, zoom out to view the journey at a glance. The rating markers will create a heat map of UX issues and it should be easy to observe areas where the team is most aligned.

To initiate the discussion, start at the first step with a yellow or red marker. Review the HMW statements, add notes and continue forward in sequence.

If you are low on time, focus on the steps that look the most severe or keep it open ended — “What steps and issues stood out to you the most?”

Wrap up

After a healthy discussion I find it best to thank everyone, share high-level next steps, and let ideas breathe. I’m also a fan of summarizing the results of the exercise and allowing cross-functional leads to make progress on follow up activities async to reduce overall effort.

Next Steps:

1. Prioritize opportunities — Use the ratings heat map to prioritize the most critical “How might we…” statements and draft hypotheses.
2. Review behavioral data — Evaluate click-flow analytics (or instrument the flows) to measure task success and drop offs along the funnel.
3. User test the flow — Observe people using your product to validate the issues identified and plot new ones along the flow (this is a living artifact after all).
4. Evaluate competitors — Map competitive flows and compare scores.
5. Start concept design — Draft an ideal user flow to capture the next level of requirements, or try solution sketching.
6. Compare the before and after — Use the flow and score from the exercise as a baseline to compare improvements. The first objective should be to reduce the number of red and yellow areas, and the second is to reduce the total number of steps involved. It’s better to add a step if it will reduce the difficulty of another than eliminate a step if it adds more cognitive load.