Friction: What Psychology Tells Us About Making Things Easy

What you will learn

Finally, you have some free time for yourself, and you feel like watching something. You turn on your streaming app – in this case, Netflix. And all of a sudden, you catch yourself staring at some random trailer that Netflix plays on your screen. 

How did it even happen? Netflix does this trick where it takes away the need to click for a preview to start playing. That’s why you ended up watching some ridiculous trailer you normally wouldn’t be interested in at all.

Netflix does a great job of removing friction. The whole choice architecture (the context in which users make decisions) is designed around making everything as automatic and (almost) as effortless as possible.

This ebook explains how powerful friction costs can be across a range of decisions and actions, how small actions such as removing a step or pre-completing elements of the process can be significant, and how you should design solutions for existing customer behaviors.

It also takes you through examples of how friction can be increased when required, and why it might be important to do so.