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Friction and Effort in the Consumer Journey

Removing friction is treated as an unqualified good. The evidence supports something more specific and more interesting.

By Hamid Reza Mohagheghi Published Updated

Reducing friction is treated as an unqualified good in product work. The underlying evidence supports something narrower: small effort costs suppress behavior far more than their objective magnitude suggests. That is a fact about effort, not an instruction about direction, and it cuts both ways.

Why trivial effort has non-trivial effects

The disproportion has several sources. Effort is experienced at the moment of action while benefits are often deferred. Each additional step is an opportunity for attention to be captured elsewhere. And processing fluency itself carries evaluative weight — material that is easier to process is judged more favourably and more truthful, an effect documented across contexts (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009).

Bettman, Luce and Payne (1998) framed the underlying principle as constructive choice under an effort-accuracy trade-off: people select decision strategies partly on the basis of cognitive cost, not only expected accuracy. Increase the cost of a strategy and they switch to a cheaper one, which often means switching to a heuristic or not deciding at all.

Where removing friction is right

Friction that serves no one — re-entering details the system already holds, mandatory account creation before a first purchase, forms requesting information nobody will use — is pure loss. It suppresses behavior the person actively wants to perform and produces no compensating benefit.

The Fogg behavior model puts this simply: behavior occurs when motivation, ability and a prompt coincide, and ability is often the cheapest variable to change. Where motivation exists, lowering effort is the highest-yield intervention available.

Where adding friction is right

The symmetric case is less discussed. Deliberate friction is appropriate where the action is irreversible, high-value, or where the person's momentary state is a poor guide to their considered preference.

Examples with reasonable evidence behind them: cooling-off periods before large purchases, confirmation steps before destructive actions, mandatory review before a transfer that cannot be reversed. In each case the friction protects the person from a version of themselves acting under time pressure or incomplete information.

Sunstein's discussion of sludge (2019) supplies the discriminating question. Friction that protects the person is justified. Friction that protects the firm's revenue from the person's intentions is sludge, and the same mechanism serves both purposes, which is why the mechanism cannot be evaluated without asking who benefits.

The asymmetry test

The most practical diagnostic is comparative rather than absolute. Measure the effort required to enter a commitment against the effort required to leave it. Two clicks to subscribe and a phone call to cancel is an asymmetry that no design rationale explains, and it is now the specific target of regulatory attention in several jurisdictions — see dark patterns.

Friction as a signal

A final consideration: effort communicates. A process that is effortless can signal that the decision is inconsequential, which is sometimes false. Where a commitment is genuinely significant, a small amount of deliberate ceremony helps the person register that fact, and improves the quality of the consent obtained.

What this means in practice

Map every point of effort in the journey and label each as serving the customer, serving the business, or serving neither. Remove the third category without debate. For the first two, check symmetry between entry and exit paths. That exercise usually surfaces more actionable material than a general campaign to make everything faster.

References

  1. Bettman, J. R., Luce, M. F., & Payne, J. W. (1998). Constructive consumer choice processes. Journal of Consumer Research, 25(3), 187–217.
  2. Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219–235.
  3. Sunstein, C. R. (2019). Sludge and ordeals. Duke Law Journal, 68(8), 1843–1883.
  4. Fogg, B. J. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology.
  5. Shu, S. B., & Gneezy, A. (2010). Procrastination of enjoyable experiences. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(5), 933–944.