UX & Design9 min read
The friction audit: finding the moments that cost you customers
Not all friction is bad, and not all of it is equally expensive. A friction audit finds the specific moments where effort, doubt or delay are losing you customers, and puts a cost on each.
By Product Practice, Product design & research
Teams talk about 'reducing friction' as if friction were one thing that could be turned down like a dial. In practice it is many small, specific moments: a field that rejects a valid phone number, a page that loads slowly on mobile, a button label that does not say what will happen, a plan comparison that makes every option feel risky.
Some of those moments cost a great deal. Some cost almost nothing. A few are actually helpful. A friction audit is the work of telling them apart.
Three kinds of friction
| Type | What it feels like | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Effort | This is more work than it should be | Re-entering information the product already has |
| Doubt | I am not sure what will happen | A button labelled 'Continue' on a payment step |
| Delay | I have to wait | A verification email that takes minutes to arrive |
Naming the type matters because the fixes differ. Effort is solved by removing steps. Doubt is solved by information at the right moment. Delay is solved by engineering, or by giving people something useful to do while they wait.
Not all friction should go
Confirmation before deleting something important is friction. So is a review screen before payment, or a pause before sending a message to a whole company. These moments protect the user from expensive mistakes, and removing them in the name of speed creates a different, worse kind of cost.
The test is whether the friction protects the user or protects the company's convenience. Protective friction stays. Convenience friction, such as forced account creation or unnecessary fields collected for marketing, is the first to go.
How to run the audit
- Choose the three to five journeys that carry the most revenue or cost: sign-up, checkout, onboarding, a core repeated task.
- Walk each one step by step, on mobile and desktop, as a first-time and a returning user.
- At every step, note any effort, doubt or delay, with a screenshot.
- Check analytics for drop-off at each step to see where the friction actually bites.
- Watch recordings at the worst steps to confirm the cause.
- Rate each point for reach (how many hit it) and cost (what happens when they do).
What a good audit produces
Not a list of forty issues. A short, ranked set of friction points, each with evidence, a type, an estimated cost and a proposed fix sized in effort. The top five are usually worth more than the remaining thirty-five combined, and they are usually fixable in weeks rather than quarters.
The goal is not a frictionless product. It is a product where every remaining bit of friction is earning its keep.
Product Practice
Product design & research
The product practice covers discovery, research, interaction design and design systems. It writes about the structural decisions that sit underneath an interface, and what happens when they are made carelessly.
