How a Frictionless Experience Could Ruin Your Product
As a Product Manager, it’s my job to think about friction when it comes to my products. Whenever we hear talk about friction, it’s usually in the context of how friction can be reduced. It’s arguably become an obsession in the tech space over the last few years, and it’s easy to think of examples where reducing friction has made life easier. I’m an Apple Watch wearer in London: using Apple Pay on public transport has saved me a lot of bag-rummaging, change-finding, and ticket machine visits. It’s fair to say I’m a fan of most friction-reducing technologies.
This is why I was initially surprised to read an article from Jesse Weaver entitled “The Value of Inconvenient Design”, which floats the idea that when friction is reduced too much, it reduces our perceived value of a product. Jesse gives an example of the IKEA effect, whereby two groups of people were given IKEA boxes: one group’s boxes were pre-assembled, and one group had to assemble the boxes themselves. When asked to assign a value to the boxes, the self-assembly group valued their boxes significantly higher than those who were given completed boxes.
When friction is reduced too much, it reduces our perceived value of a product
In my spare time, I’m an avid knitter, so I’m definitely familiar with this feeling. Contributing to the creation of an item really gives it a sense of worth in my eyes. My favourite items of clothing are those I’ve made myself, and I value them much higher than anything else in my wardrobe.
Knitting is the definition of a friction-heavy experience. Just to start knitting, I had to go through a lot of friction.
First, I had to learn how to knit. I was lucky enough to have a friend show me the knit stitch, but I was on my own for the purl stitch, and all the stitches since then.
To begin learning to knit, I had to source knitting needles and yarn, which meant finding a yarn shop. I also had to find a pattern which was suitable for beginners, and work out how to read said pattern.
To turn my knitting into a hobby, I had to improve my skill level, which took hours and weeks of practice.
Once I had improved my skill level, I then had to devote yet more hours and weeks to actually knitting to be able to produce anything worthwhile.
It took time, devotion and passion to teach myself to knit. There’s a learning curve involved, and now I’ve gone through that, knitting is a great hobby to have.
That’s not to say that being a knitter is the same as it would have been before the intervention of some great friction-reducing technologies. Friction has been reduced in a few key areas in the knitting world:
- I buy most of my yarn and needles online, which saves me going to a yarn shop every time I need some new kit.
- If I don’t know how to perform a new technique, I’ll watch a YouTube video to learn it, which saves me from needing to know (and pester) a knitting expert in person.
- I scout Instagram for knitting inspiration, without which I would struggle to keep my enthusiasm levels up for new projects.
- I use a site called Ravelry to buy and store all of my digital knitting patterns, which allows me to easily search patterns by a number of different parameters.
- When I’m working on a project, I save my knitting pattern to my phone so that I always have it with me and can keep note of my progress.
So I think it’s fair to say that thanks to technology, knitting in 2019 is a lower-friction hobby than it would have been in 1919. However, there are still a few areas of friction when it comes to knitting:
- I still have to do some research to find a pattern and a yarn I like
- I still have to order and wait for the delivery of my yarn and needles
- I still have to do a small gauge swatch of my chosen yarn knitted using my chosen needles before I start a project
- I still have to actually do the knitting
- I still have to weave in the ends of my yarn and sew pieces together
So let’s break it down even further — which of those areas of friction might be opportunities for product development?
- I like researching patterns and yarns — it gives me a sense of satisfaction when I pick a great yarn to make the best of a pattern.
So reducing friction too much here would make my experience worse
- I would be open to faster delivery of my supplies (although I have found an amazing online shop who rarely leave me waiting more than two days)
So there is limited potential for reducing friction here, largely around logistics of delivery, which isn’t unique to knitters
- I don’t enjoy making a gauge swatch, so I often don’t do one. I don’t think this is a process that is open to being improved by technology, as it is meant to be a sample of my own knitting technique.
There could be some potential here for reducing friction, but it would be tricky to develop
- Doing the knitting is the fun part — this is why I knit.
Reducing friction here would have to be done very carefully to avoid ruining my experience
- I would be very happy to find a way to improve the experience of weaving in ends and sewing up my garment.
So there could be some potential here for reducing friction
It’s important to realise when you have reduced friction by the right amount with a product improvement, and when you would cross a line that could make someone’s experience worse — or destroy the experience completely.
Crossing that line can happen when you don’t understand the jobs to be done for your users.
Jobs to be done is a user-focused Product Management theory which revolves around understanding what “jobs” your customers need to do that they will “hire” your product to help with.
For some customers and some products, the job to be done requires a certain level of friction. As a leisure knitter, I’m trying to do a number of jobs:
I want to relax
I want a sense of accomplishment
I want to create a finished object that I can enjoy
If you remove too much friction from my knitting experience, I’d lose my sense of accomplishment and a lot of hours of relaxation. Knitting would no longer help me to do all of my jobs, so I may find another way to do those jobs.
Working at a newspaper brand with a reputation for quality journalism, it’s important to understand that some of our readers’ jobs to be done will require a certain level of friction.
Some jobs for our readers might be:
To become more informed about a specific topic
To relax
To gain a sense of accomplishment
To keep up with breaking news
Personally, I also read to relax and to become more informed. These jobs require a certain level of friction: I can’t learn new things by osmosis, I have to digest and understand content to learn from it. If I’m reading to relax, I actively want it to take me some time to complete the article. My sense of accomplishment won’t be fulfilled if the answers to the crossword are printed right next to the questions. Friction in certain contexts can be important.
It’s important for me to keep these jobs in mind when working on products for our readers. For a newspaper, this means that we must maintain the integrity of our editorial content whenever we build new products. It’s similar to the way that taking away the need to actually knit would ruin my knitting experience; our content is the absolute core of our business and our reason for existing.
However, not everyone reads the newspaper for the same content, and this isn’t unique to the digital world — as a teenager, I’d pinch the lifestyle section and the magazines of my dad’s weekend paper and leave the sports and business sections to him. It’s natural that we all have different interests, and helping people to find content that they will enjoy is something that can reduce friction in the right area.
Using this example, it’s fair to say that some personalisation of a newspaper website is beneficial — if you know that I like lifestyle content, why not recommend it to me?
Where the line could be crossed is if a reduction in friction takes away my ability to complete the job I’m trying to do. I might typically be a lifestyle reader, but today I’m visiting a newspaper website to learn more about some breaking news. If the website has been personalised to the extent that I can’t navigate my way to the breaking news section, I cannot complete the job that I’m here to do. Next time I’ll go somewhere else, where I feel that I have the autonomy to find the content I need.
It’s important for us as Product Managers to find the sweet spot: useful friction reduction which enables our customers get more out of our products without hindering our core proposition (in the case of a newspaper, that’s editorial content). When your core proposition entails a level of friction in this way, it can be a delicate balance. In this situation, understanding your customers’ jobs to be done can help to identify the right areas to reduce friction — and the wrong ones.
