What is Friction?
Understanding friction is the sneakiest and most important thing to consider when you are developing products.
So, what is it?
Friction is anything that gets in the way of your users and what they want to do. It includes things that are beyond your control and things that you design into the system by accident. Friction can be caused by your culture, by you, or by your customers themselves. Friction can come from anywhere. The only way to combat it is to be aware of where it can come from and to diligently keep it at bay.
Why is friction bad?
Anything that keeps your customer from doing what they want to do with your product will put your product in a bad light. It will mean that your customers will leave a bad review or be contacting support more often. You will need to have customer support ready to deal with an issue that can be avoided.
There are three types of friction that we talk about when we are developing products. They are recognized by where they come from. There is customer friction, designed friction, and cultural friction.
Customer Friction
Customer friction has more to do with context than anything else. Where is the customer when they are using your products? For example, if you have an online photo editing app and the customer is trying to use it in the backwoods of Oregon you might have context friction. The app may depend on a robust network connection, and they can only get spotty 3G. Often the customer doesn’t think that they are in a remote place, they feel that your app doesn’t work.
Designed Friction
There is no way to avoid it. You are not your customers. And if you are a builder of any type, you will not be able to get your head out of your app long enough to be able to see your product as your customer does. This is design friction.
Icons are where I see this show up most often. With only a few exceptions, there is not a standard vocabulary around iconography. You may think that what an icon represents is as clear as day, but it’s not. What you think is the most obvious thing in the world will be nonsense to your customers. They will learn, but if you are trusting an icon to communicate a critical function and it’s not one of the really small sets of nav icons that have become common, you are in for trouble.
Cultural Friction
Cultural friction is often harder to see until it’s too late. Cultural friction usually starts when you have a content expert, partner or teammate that contributes to the process too late. For example, you’ve already designed and tested the signup form. After that has been completed, you have to go back and add in an email newsletter signup form because your product manager forgot to tell you about it. Now you need to shoehorn in this form functionality. It’s just a radio button, so you add it in and move on.
About three weeks later you start getting complaints that users have to agree to a newsletter to signup. And, you somehow missed writing a privacy policy for the app. So now you have a rats nest on your hands that needs to be dealt with before you can move on.
Cultural friction comes in many forms, but it almost always comes from something that “must be included” and wasn’t considered as part of the design process.
How do you avoid friction?
Relentless testing and hard work. There is no way to avoid it. Your job as a maker is to be constantly testing and listening to your users to get the friction as low as possible. You will need to diligently test the final solution to make sure that your customers are pleased with what you’ve created and whenever friction comes up, smooth it out immediately.
I would argue that reducing friction is way more important than adding requested features. Even if you have the most fantastic product on the planet but your users can’t use it, it doesn’t matter.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
