Good Friction

A maxim you learn early and often in product optimization is to remove friction. Remove it from the purchase funnel. Eliminate unnecessary screens and text. Streamline your activation flow.

And I wholeheartedly agree… most of the time. In most cases the right path forward is to eliminate as much friction from a system as possible. But most is not all.

So when is friction good? Good friction comes when adding additional steps actually increases the total value of a system.

One of my favorite examples of Good Friction comes from games. In games, the entire premise is how do you add just enough friction into a process to make the act of playing it an achievement and fun.

If holding the right arrow on the D-pad of Super Mario Brothers was all you needed to do to win every level, no one would know the name of Princess Peach, Luigi, or Bowser. It simply would not be fun. The key is to add in just the right amount of friction, at the right time, to create a fun an compelling experience that keeps the user coming back. In the case of Super Mario Brothers, every level added in a bit more friction until you finally won.

The purchase funnel is a classic place to examine Good Friction. When a potential customer comes to your site and is looking to buy, they will have a wide range of intent.

A high intent user just needs to get through the purchase funnel as quickly as possible. Here, eliminating friction is exactly the right move. But then there are low intent users. For these users, the best thing you can do is actually to try to and increase their intent through “Good Friction”. In this case, Good Friction would be to get them to a page with additional information, have them watch a video, or fill out a quiz that helps them understand the product better and thus increase their intent, and likelihood to buy.

The tricky part is being able to tell which user is which.

Ask yourself: What kind of friction do I need in this funnel?