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Businesses Lied To You About Friction
We need to recognize how executives have coopted friction
Friction, at its most basic, is all the stuff that prevents people from doing things. The self-help writer Bob Sutton described it as “simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult and maybe a little bit more frustrating.”
The traditional business argument is that it makes some sense to want to remove friction. If a customer has a barrier to purchasing a product, then they are going to often move on to another product that doesn’t have that barrier. As a result of this logic, there is now an explicit goal by many executives and founders to eliminate all friction in the customer or user experience. Then-CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan, highlighted this perspective when he infamously quipped in 2019 during the company’s Inbound conference: “Dollars flow where the friction is low.”
Reality is, of course, more complicated than this truism, as companies have never just made money by providing a seamless customer experience (see monopolies, price fixing, etc). It’s a fiction — and we will go over the specifics of how and why soon — but just keep in mind that this rhetoric manages to accomplish a very interesting thing.
