Friction
What is friction?
Friction is everything that makes an action harder than it needs to be: a confusing navigation, a slow page, a checkout that demands registration, a form asking for a company number from a private buyer. Friction rarely produces a complaint — it produces a closed tab, which is why it is found in recordings and funnels rather than in feedback.
Where it usually hides
- Speed: a page that takes seconds to respond on a phone.
- Surprises: a delivery cost that appears only at the last step, a required registration, a price without VAT for a private buyer.
- Effort: long forms, fields that ask for what the visitor does not know, a code sent by text that does not arrive.
- Uncertainty: no clear return policy, no phone number, no reviews, an unfamiliar payment page.
- Confusion: two buttons that look equally important, a menu with jargon, a filter that empties the page.
Example
An online shop for sports supplements loses 70% of visitors at checkout. The analytics show where, but not why. Watching fifty session recordings shows three things: the discount code field sends people off to search for a code, the postcode field rejects codes typed with a space, and on phones the “Continue” button sits below the keyboard.
The shop hides the code field behind a link, accepts postcodes in any format and keeps the button visible above the keyboard. Checkout abandonment falls to 58%, which on the shop’s traffic is about 140 more orders a month. None of the three problems had ever been reported by a customer.
Why it matters for a business
Friction rarely produces a complaint; it produces a closed tab. Customers do not write to say the form was annoying; they buy elsewhere. That is why it has to be looked for, not waited for: in funnels that show where people stop, in recordings and heatmaps that show why, and in forms that were started and not sent.
Some friction is useful. A confirmation before a large order, or a question that filters out enquiries the business cannot serve, protects both sides. The aim is to remove the friction that serves no one.
What to ask
- At which step do we lose the most visitors, and have we watched what they do there?
- What does a customer learn only at the last step that they would want to know earlier?
- Have we tried buying or enquiring on our own site on a phone, as a stranger would?
- Which of our fields, steps and confirmations are there for the customer, and which only for us?
Friction is most often in the site itself: a slow page, a long form, an unclear button. We remove it in our website development, and later look for it in session recordings and unfinished forms.