How to Spot and Minimize Digital Friction: 4 Steps for Success

Welcome to Digital Adoption Insider, your source for common challenges and actionable tips on driving digital and software adoption. If you're interested in staying up-to-date on the latest digital and software adoption trends, click the "subscribe" button above.?

Enjoy the Digital Adoption Insider? Support us by sharing our newsletter with your network and subscribing today!?

UX isn't just a buzzword—it's a cornerstone of tech and end-user adoption.

For users to embrace a new app, process, or digital service, it needs to be straightforward, beneficial, and, above all, user-friendly.

But let's face it- business processes can be inherently clunky, and technology doesn't always simplify things. Issues like poor UI design, overly complicated forms, convoluted processes, lack of end-user support, and outdated software contribute to what is called ‘digital friction’.

Understanding digital friction—recognizing what it is and its potential drawbacks—is the crucial first step toward mitigating its impact.

What Is Digital Friction?

Digital friction is essentially any barrier or inefficiency that users face when navigating digital interfaces or processes. This friction can sour the user experience, dip customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, hurt business conversion rates.

Here are some common examples of digital friction:

• Complicated app interfaces: An overload of buttons, options, or links can overwhelm users, making it difficult to locate what they need.
• Slow loading times: When a page or app drags its heels loading, it can quickly lead to user frustration.
• Lack of contextual support: When onboarding, training, and help resources aren't tailored to the user's specific needs, it diminishes the effectiveness.
• Inconsistent design: Erratic designs can disorient users and degrade the overall user experience.

Recognizing these types of digital friction is the first step towards crafting smoother, more engaging digital journeys for your users.

Understanding the Impact of Digital Friction

Digital friction isn’t just an annoyance; it significantly affects user experience, leading to less productive employees, squandered technology investments, and unmet business objectives. When end-users struggle to fully utilize an enterprise application or digital process, the repercussions can be extensive, including:

• Productivity loss: Enterprise software is supposed to boost employee efficiency and productivity. However, digital friction can have the reverse effect, causing users to need support during crucial moments, which may result in improper or non-use of applications.
• Internal resistance to change: If digital transformations don’t meet end-user needs, dissatisfaction can lead to change fatigue and resistance to change, making future adaptations even more challenging.
• Lower user adoption: Excessive digital friction can deter users from engaging with a platform or app fully, reducing its perceived value and utility.
• Lost revenue: Inability to utilize a digital application as intended can prevent organizations from achieving their desired business outcomes.

How to Identify and Eliminate Digital Friction in Your Processes

Here are four steps to find and eliminate digital friction across your processes:?

1. Analyze end-user journeys

To find the digital friction your users may be experiencing, you need to put yourself in their shoes. Go through your digital processes as if you were one of the end-users:

• Walk through the end-user processes and user flows you’ve built, like adding a new contact to your CRM or updating a deal status. Document any points of friction you experience on the way.?
• Capture, monitor, and analyze end-user behavior analytics to identify high-user dropoff areas. Identify actions, such as filling out field forms or trouble screens, that users start but don’t finish.?
• Recruit testers to walk through your processes and report any challenges, confusion, or difficulties they experience. This outside perspective can help you identify problems you may be overlooking or unaware of.?

Start by examining your most significant, important, and impactful processes — but don’t stop there. Even small friction points can lead to frustrations and poor user experiences. Eventually, you’ll want to make improvements across the board.?

With a digital adoption platform, you can track and analyze end-user behavior to identify friction areas, map end-user flows, build user cohorts, track process governance, test new workflows, and more.

2. Create in-app guidance and end-user documentation to address friction areas

In-app guidance, like product tours and interactive walkthroughs, helps users navigate complex processes or applications that can’t be simplified. These on-screen experiences show users where to find key information or product features and encourage them to keep moving forward.?

Some features of in-app guidance include:?

• Contextual tips: Pop-ups, UI tooltips, and self-help widgets provide short explanations, tips, or links to detailed guides when the information is most relevant to the user.?

• Personalized suggestions: Based on past behaviors or end-user type, offer contextual in-app support that builds on the knowledge your user already has, all in the flow of work.?

• Progress indicators: Let users know how far along they are in the process to encourage them to complete each step.?

• Task checklists: A user onboarding task list gives an overview of each step a user should take to get familiar with a product and its features. These can also be deployed when processes are changed or new features are released.

• Alerts: An on-screen alert notifies users if they’re not using a feature correctly or points them to new product features or changed navigation sites.?

• Self-help resources: Quick in-app access to knowledge bases, SOPs, and other process-related support resources makes it easy for users to find additional information, at the moment of need.?

3. Enable end-users with real-time support

Even with simplified digital processes and in-app help, users are likely to experience hiccups once in a while. It’s important to offer real-time support to help users through unexpected problems or issues.?

Chatbots, searchable knowledge bases, and live support are all ways to fill that gap for customer-facing end-users. For internal end-users, SOPs, service desks, and internal wikis provide contextual end-user support. These options allow users to take control of finding help and specific resources as they need it.?

Real-time support options also prevent digital friction by minimizing the time a user needs to wait for help. A user may choose not to reach out for support if the process seems too time-consuming or drawn out, such as calling a call center or waiting for an email reply from an internal service desk. Self-service helps enable users to get answers or guidance 24/7.

4. Collect feedback from your end-users

While behavioral analytics provide quantitative data for you to overcome friction areas, end-user feedback provides qualitative data. End-user feedback helps identify digital friction points to overcome dropoff areas and poor UX to drive adoption rates.?

You can collect feedback directly from your users through:?

• In-app surveys?
• Zoom-based customer interviews?
• Email-based feedback surveys and user polls

Going straight to your users allows them to share their ideas, frustrations, or problems. They may bring new friction points to your attention that you weren’t aware of before.?

Combining this with end-user behavioral analytics provides a more full picture. Going beyond direct user feedback sheds light on issues that current or past users haven’t directly shared with your team.?

Travel management software company Deem launched a new version of its back-end system for end-users and admins in late 2023. It used Whatfix to create end-user surveys to collect customer feedback and validated it with quantitative behavioral analytics.

Kavita Pillai, Product Engagement Manager at Deem

“We collect qualitative feedback from customers who say certain old features are worse than the new features in our new Deem platform. We then create User Actions with Whatfix to test and validate this feedback to see if the new app’s features have a higher dropoff rate or less competition. Often this is validated, and we use this data to prioritize our product roadmap based upon these end-user analytics and feedback.”??

With a digital adoption platform, you can build in-app surveys to collect end-user feedback with multiple feedback templates across formats like NPS, post-training surveys, new feature requests, and more.

Augment, test, and validate this data to paint a more comprehensive picture and create more fluid applications and processes.

3 Examples of Overcoming Digital Friction

Need more proof of how to execute on reducing digital friction? Here are three examples:

1. Reducing form requirements to improve sign-ups

Whether you’re hosting an in-person event or driving product-led trial sign-ups, registration should be easy.?

It’s common to want to know as much about registered users as possible so you can categorize them and deliver personalized experiences effectively — but asking too much of them early on can push them away.?

Rather than asking for all their info during the initial registration process, cutting sign-up forms down to the most important basics can encourage users over that first hurdle and boost completion rates.?

2. Using in-app tips to reduce employee onboarding questions

As new employees work through new hire paperwork, onboarding, and training programs, they’re sure to have a few questions. While digital onboarding systems can make the entire process more productive, it also means new hires might seek out support when they run into an issue or have a question.?

In-app tips and contextual pop-ups can give new hires additional information or context to questions or expectations. This keeps the process moving along smoothly and prevents disruption far beyond initial onboarding and throughout their employee lifecycle with contextual guidance and support, in the flow of work.

3. Offering one-click checkout to boost conversions

Filling out shipping and billing forms can be enough of an annoyance to stop a user from completing the transaction — but those forms require crucial information for making a purchase.?

Rather than trying to cut corners to simplify the checkout process, one-click checkout and integration with digital wallets can make buying online faster and easier.?

These purchasing options allow users to securely share card and shipping information without having to type it in every time they want to make a purchase. This friction-free approach can significantly improve conversion rates by simplifying the buying process.

Continue reading about how to reduce digital friction here.?

?? Digital transformation clicks with Whatfix

Whatfix streamlines the build vs. buy decision in user onboarding, offering a no-code platform that crafts personalized in-app guidance and support. It’s an ideal solution for businesses exploring efficient ways to onboard users without the heavy lifting of developing custom software. With Whatfix, create dynamic flows, pop-ups, and task lists for an engaging onboarding experience directly within your apps.

Leveraging Whatfix’s analytics, pinpoint workflow inefficiencies and user engagement blocks to optimize onboarding paths and improve user experiences. The platform’s capability to gather real-time feedback through in-app Surveys further refines your strategy, making Whatfix a compelling choice for businesses seeking a balance between customization and convenience in user onboarding.

Explore our library of customer success stories now!

?? Essential reads for digital adoption & enablement professionals

Accenture — Accenture and Oracle Collaborate to Help Clients Accelerate Generative AI Adoption, Starting with the Finance Organization

Accenture and Oracle are investing in new generative AI solutions, tools, and trainings to help clients across industries maximize the value of their data and achieve continuous innovation. Leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI, they aim to improve efficiency, resilience, and customer experience while keeping data secure.

CIO Dive — Marriott gears up for another year of major tech spending

Marriott International is planning another year of significant tech spend as the hotel company makes inroads on its multiyear digital transformation plan. Full-year investment spending is expected to reach $1 billion to $1.2 billion, representing a higher-than-historical investment in technology for the company. Marriot expects the vast majority of the tech spend will be reimbursed over time. Capital and technology expenditures totaled $109 million during Q1 2024.?

?? Whatfix news bites

• Whatfix has been named a Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights' first-ever Voice of the Customer DAP report. Whatfix is the only DAP provider in the Customers’ Choice category! This report is based on customer Gartner Peer Insights reviews. This achievement highlights Whatfix’s industry leadership and underscores the vital role played by our customers, who consistently review us on Gartner Peer Insights. We couldn’t have done it without you!
• Thank you to everyone who visited our booth at the #SAPNow India event this week in Mumbai!? We were thrilled to showcase the transformative power of Whatfix on SAP applications and how Whatfix helps achieve faster ROI from SAP implementations.?

?? Whatfix podcast catchup?

• Charlie Valerio, CIO at Aboitus Power, discusses his journey from multinational corporations to local conglomerates in the Philippines, driven by a desire to contribute to local industry growth. Valerio emphasizes the importance of aligning with organizational leadership, highlights the significance of securing buy-in from stakeholders, and stresses the critical role of CEO leadership in digital transformation efforts.
• Derek Bruce, CEO of Derek Bruce Associates and a global HR thought leader, emphasizes the importance of aligning individual motivations with organizational goals and the need for personalized approaches to motivation and recognition. Bruce shares the importance of understanding individual motivations and adopting leadership styles accordingly, as well as the impact of technology on HR strategies.?

Don’t forget to subscribe to this newsletter to receive best practices, tips, and insider trends on empowering employees by driving the adoption of new technologies and features.