Intentional Friction : Why you need it

Lately “frictionless” has been a buzz word for both internal process and for client delivery. The idea is that removing friction helps improve user experience, satisfaction, and retention. Think of those multi-step intake forms that you give up on when you get to page 3 thinking “is this even worth my time? There must be a better way.” This move towards reducing friction has been noble. It makes sense. However, now some leaders are equating all friction as “bad” and trying to not just reduce, but remove it entirely. That’s where I throw up the yellow flag – there’s such thing as good, intentional friction. 

When solving for clients or employees, business processes sometimes need friction. It has to be intentional and well-crafted, but friction does have its time and place. If you are thinking, “no way, friction is something that gets in the way,” let me see if I can persuade you... Have you ever seen a sales rep get to the final stages of a deal or even have a customer sign a proposal and then you catch that the profit margin is too low or the payment terms are going to cause operational headaches? You know what that process was missing? Intentional friction. Perhaps a required approval, review, or standards to follow. Have you ever joined a project mid-flight and had a hard time coming up to speed because there was no documentation or everyone stored information differently? Again, that was missing intentional friction. Think of how required documentation can help save time and headache on team handoffs. I think we can all recall being on the receiving end of a software bug that causes an app to be down or security to have been compromised. That often is due to a process miss of not having proper testing before launch. Another example of intentional friction saving the day! 

I once worked with a company that wanted to make their initial stages of their sales process completely “frictionless.” This can be an excellent exercise to go through; however, if not done with a lot of questions of where are pauses needed, they may have ended up with a clogged top of funnel with too many unqualified leads and they could have wasted their reps’ time with having calls that were with a prospect that didn’t match their target profile. To not waste time of your prospects or their reps, we designed an approach that required the prospect to answer three short questions that helped them learn a bit more about the company and self-assess whether they were a good fit to set up a meeting with a sales rep to know more. This saved their reps time and allowed them to focus on more fruitful conversations, increasing call-to-conversion rates and overall revenue.  

I hope at this point you’re bought in. Sometimes processes need friction to operate as intended. Too often we are afraid of anything that causes us to pause or slow down. We operate under the assumption that all speed is great, and all pauses are problematic. It’s not that black and white.

Slowing down and being intentional about process is sometimes the exact right thing to do.  

Next time you’re having the “frictionless experience” discussion, also ask yourself “where do I need a bit of friction?”