In Praise of Friction
How Friction Can Improve Customer and Company outcomes
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In Praise of Friction
Hi friends,
Happy new year! I hope everyone had a great end to 2022 and is excited for the new year.
This week, I’ll be discussing the upsides of friction.
Companies typically aim to reduce friction in their users’ lives. In many cases, the product/service the company provides is directly aimed to reduce friction. For example, Uber reduces the friction of getting somewhere, Amazon reduces the friction of purchasing things and Stripe reduces the friction of accepting payments online.
In addition, no matter what product it is, companies also aim to reduce friction around making their product accessible, whether it might be:
friction around signing up / onboarding
friction around paying (accepting all payment methods, etc)
friction around usage (making the experience smooth and fast)
friction around finding the product (by leveraging multiple channels)
But friction isn’t always bad. In fact, there are many cases where friction can be beneficial. I’ll focus on how it can be helpful in technology products, but the principle applies more broadly than that.
At a high level, friction can sometimes lead to better outcomes for both the user and the company building a product in a few key ways:
preventing users from making bad decisions
serving as a form of self-regulation
increasing positive actions from users via “commitment” or skin-in-the-game.
This is best illustrated by examples of friction inserted at various points in a product, so let’s get into it!
I. Adding Friction to Onboarding
Typically, growth teams at tech companies are maniacally focused on making onboarding as simple as possible and reducing the number of steps to the bare minimum. But sometimes, adding friction in the onboarding flow can be helpful, if it makes the user feel a higher sense of commitment.
A great example is when language learning app Duolingo added a step in their process: a screen asking users to set a “streak goal”. They didn’t do anything with the user’s answer, but users who were shown this screen had higher retention of usage than those who weren’t shown it. Adding a step improved retention!
II. Adding Friction to Core Actions
Companies always aim to make taking core actions in their product as simple as possible. But sometimes, those may not be in the best interest of the user, and asking the user to rethink it or having some friction there could be a good idea, especially in fields such as finance and healthcare.
As one example, after UK legislation, Paracetamol package sizes became smaller (i.e., the number of pills in a package was reduced). In the 10 years following the change, there were 43% fewer paracetamol overdose-related deaths.
Another good example is robo-advisor Betterment, which adds a little bit of friction to certain transactions that users may take regarding buying/selling their assets in the form of a nudge about tax impact. These nudges help users sometimes delay/change their decisions in a way that is beneficial to them from an aggregate returns perspective, as in the below excerpt.
So here’s a neat thing. So somebody is worried about markets, worried that they’re about to go down. They come in and they say, “I want to go to zero percent stocks. I want to go to cash.” They might at some level remember that that might bring long-term or short-term capital gains treatment with it, but they don’t think about it in that moment. They’re not going to go off and calculate their cost bases and say, “This is how much it’s going to cost.” What we do is we say, “Okay, totally fine. You can go to zero percent stocks. Just so you know, that’s going to cost you $250 in short-term capital gains taxes next April. If you waited 62 days, that wouldn’t be the case. It would be long-term.”
You’re putting this really relevant piece of information that wouldn’t be top of mind for them and right in front of them for them to incorporate it into that decision and make a better decision. If they still want to do it, they can totally do it, but you’re like, “You probably weren’t thinking about this and I want to make sure that you consider them.” What we generally find is we did an RCT on that and somewhere between depending on circumstances, 70 to 90% of people don’t go through with that allocation change to go to cash.
Dan Egan, Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment
Another example from Finance, but in the opposite sense is Robinhood (which I’ve discussed at length), which arguably made options investing so frictionless that many users unaware of what exactly they were doing lost a bunch of money.
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III. Adding Friction to Recurring Usage
While companies want their customers to use their products as often and as much as possible, sometimes they too realize that it is in their and their customer’s best interest to add friction to this usage for the best long-term outcomes.
One great example of this is social media. In recent times, many of the apps have added some form of screen limits in the app. These introduce some friction to continuing to use the app and undoubtedly lower the aggregate time spent in them. But, they benefit both the user and the company. For users, it helps them keep their usage in check to the point that they stay happy with their usage and time on the app. For the company, it serves as a way for them to keep their users relatively happier (and prevent them from going over the edge and deleting the app) and as a form of self-regulation which reduces the likelihood of various governmental agencies stepping in.
Another example is gambling. While a lot of mobile gambling is designed to make betting as easy as possible, many companies are over time adding in friction at various points for some or all gamblers to encourage responsible and safe gambling. This includes the use of things such as betting limits, increasing the time between deposits and money being available and capping losses/stopping to take bets after a point from young gamblers (see Paddy Power), and even advertising these things. While some of it is largely a way of self-regulating and even appearing favorable to regulators, these features do help particularly problem gamblers moderate their gambling.
Adding Friction to the Channel / Price
Sometimes, purposefully introducing friction in the channel or price of the product can lead to better user outcomes.
Typically, friction in these cases serves as a form of either (1) self-selection, (2) commitment, or (3) skin in the game, which leads to better outcomes for users.
This is most commonly seen in examples related to online learning. There’s a plethora of online classes available on-demand to everyone via Coursera and the likes, but the completion rates are very low, often only 4% or so. But charging for a certificate, even if that certificate isn’t inherently valuable increases the completion rate of courses, sometimes to as much as 90%.
Similarly, cohort-based learning, which involves learning with a group of people at a fixed time, introduces some friction into the product (fixed time rather than on-demand) which on-demand online learning took away. However, they tend to have 85% completion rates vs the 4% for online. While they aren’t the same product, in some sense it illustrates that in some cases adding friction to the product can lead to better user outcomes.
Closing Thoughts
Generally, companies are extremely focused on reducing friction, and rightly so. But in certain instances, friction can be a positive, and it’s worth considering how adding friction could lead to better outcomes.
As a final example, the philosophy underpinning the crypto industry can be seen as an example of positive friction. Users often have to store their keys themselves, but doing so gives them the benefit of ownership that can’t be taken away from them easily. Users in some sense trade friction for security and ownership. However, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be lower friction ways to onramp/offramp into crypto, purchase NFTs, etc.
In closing, it's important to note that adding friction should not be done with the intent of benefiting the company at the expense of the user. For example, many publications and subscription services are easy to sign up for but make it incredibly difficult to cancel, such as the Wall Street Journal requiring customers to call in order to cancel their subscription (as below). This type of friction is negative and only furthers the company's interests, rather than benefiting both the user and the company and represents the use of a dark pattern more than anything else.
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