Can A Fraction Too Much Friction Improve Customer Experience?

Friction is bad.

That’s what best practice has told us for years. When it comes to winning the hearts and minds of customers, the path to success must be as slick as a teflon coated waterslide. And with the emergence of digital, we were free from the physical tethers of bricks and mortar which allowed us to shorten the path to purchase until it was barely a path at all.

Convenience has been the name of the game. One click. Bundle. Personalise.

Brands were told to build an audience where the customers are, chasing customers around the web with offers and suggestions, using every ounce of computational power to lure them further down the mighty funnel. When they were ready, you’d be there.

For the longest time, it’s worked. Fortunes were made and tech titans forged in the white-hot fires of efficiency. Marketers looked on in adoration at what they had built. And it was glorious.

Yet today, that same glorious machine may be starting to lose its shine.?

A recent discussion on LinkedIn examined this pinnacle of brand and retail performance through the lens of today and has perhaps found it wanting.

An always-on, convenience above all else mindset has led us to a point where nothing seems fulfilling anymore. We’ve tried to personalise everything to the point where our efforts have lost all personality. And as our channels become more fragmented, and each channel a sea of AI-powered sameness, it’s proving harder to find anything to get excited about.

We’ve found when everyone makes their experience easy, it commodifies the product. When things are commoditised, it destroys what makes our brands different. The very point of promotion in the first place.

We raced to the end only to realise the path we shortened was the runway good brands needed to take off.?

Staring at the instant gratification culture we have become, does that present a case for friction as a feature, not a bug? Making experiences a little harder, sales a little less convenient?

Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of bad types of friction. Trying to download six weeks of travel photos from my Android phone to my Apple Mac or Microsoft laptop has shown me an endless frustration loop I’d been grossly unprepared for.

However, there are plenty of examples we can look to which show a few bumps in the road might make our customers more sticky.?

The prestigious US University, MIT identifies good friction as being human-first. Something which engages users in decision-making during the conversion process and ultimately can lead to brand endorsement. They identify good friction as when users are given more opportunities to make decisions and understand the implication of those decisions.?

Decision making, not taking them away. They see what it takes to attain and convince themselves, it’s worth it.

A study in the Harvard Business Review identifies the improvement in our recall when the message is harder to read. When the font is smaller, less legible typeface. Making text harder to skim forces readers to process more carefully. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that causing people to slow down and read more purposefully improves their recall.

With so much information flooding our channels each day, anything which will encourage a reader to take pause and consider is most welcome.

Making things unavailable or unattainable also generates desire. The luxury industry is built around this idea, of building scarcity. If the products were easy to attain, they wouldn’t have the appeal. We value things more when they are harder to get. Feeling that you might not be able to get it when you want it produces artificial demand.

Logan Paul’s line of Prime hydration drinks attempted to leverage this thinking and for a while, succeeded. Turns out, young people loved the treasure hunt. Working harder for their payoff. While the inferior nature of the product ultimately led to its demise, the lessons are there.

Apple has built a sustained tribe of zealots through systematic product releases, showing a drip feed can also work. Though in 2024 we could argue each iteration is not necessarily better than the last or adding much to the customer other than a little dopamine hit when they get to show off their latest model phone.?

The video game industry tapped into this thinking early, using the seemingly endless grind of levelling up to promote a sense of achievement, even if it was just for a handful of shiny pixels to adorn a fictitious alter ego.?

World of Warcraft still has seven million humans actively playing each month, almost 20 years after its initial release. That’s staying power. And no one would call that playing experience seamless and easy. But when you’ve worked that hard for Level 50, you feel like you’ve earned it.

However, for new brands starting out, the challengers or those without an Apple or Activision budget, it might not be that simple. We’d all like to make billions from a slightly different iteration rolling out in an annual controlled product release.?

If we do add friction back into the customer experience, to build emotional investment it’s important to factor in two key elements.?

Valuable. There needs to be an added benefit of the friction to the buyer. Even if that advantage is being a part of an exclusive club that is “in the know” for this experience. All marketers are trying to showcase the value of their solution, but if you’re going to make the customer experience harder, the payoff needs to be greater.

A welcome message which asks for customer details is friction which might help brands qualify their traffic, but it doesn’t add value to the user. This is what’s important.

Deliberate. There should be a strategy behind the friction to create the value in the experience rather than friction caused by incompetence or worse, apathy. We’re not enamoured by Telstra because their rewards system is clunky and frustrating. I certainly don’t love Google more because it’s proving impossible to get my holiday snaps into a format I can print.

Smarter thinking in the process will allow customers to engage their thinking and feel the conscious decision is theirs, increasing stickiness.

Marketers talk about building genuine connections with their brands. While this might be misguided - customers really don’t care about us - the next best thing might be building a system where they have to work a little harder for it.

Make the decisions more deliberate and the perceived value will get a boost.

And the payoff is satisfaction in your customers that you really are fulfilling a need. So the next time they’re in market for what you’re selling, they’re more likely to think of you first.

Beau Ushay is a marketing specialist who helps companies create good customer experiences and be remembered when it counts. If you’d like to get a free audit of your customer journey or find out how you can attract, convince and convert customers better, get in touch [email protected].