Designing Out the Friction

Every business contains friction

Friction is anything that makes an action harder than it needs to be.

It is the form that asks for information the customer has already supplied. The approval that passes through four people when only one decision is required. The employee searching three platforms for the current version of a document. The instructions written from the organisation’s perspective rather than the reader’s. The sales process that repeatedly stops while somebody searches for a price, image, specification or answer.

Individually, these moments appear insignificant. Across hundreds of employees, thousands of transactions and years of operation, they become expensive.

The cost is not limited to time. Friction produces mistakes, rework, support calls, abandoned transactions and delayed decisions. It frustrates customers and exhausts employees. It creates administration around work that should have been easy to complete in the first place.

Most businesses learn to live with it.

Employees develop workarounds. Experienced people remember which steps can be ignored and which colleague knows how to get something approved. Customers call for assistance because the website cannot answer their question. Managers insert themselves into routine decisions because the system does not provide sufficient clarity for others to make them.

Eventually, the workaround becomes the way the organisation works.

This is why friction can be difficult to detect from inside a business. Each department sees its own activity, but few people see the complete journey. Marketing sees the enquiry. Sales sees the opportunity. Operations sees the order. Finance sees the invoice. The customer experiences all of it as one relationship.

Design examines that relationship as a connected whole. It asks what somebody is trying to achieve, what they must do to achieve it and what stands in their way. It follows the movement of people, information and decisions across departmental boundaries.

The objective is not simply to improve individual interactions. It is to make the entire journey work.

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Begin with the journey

Businesses tend to describe processes according to their internal structure: marketing, sales, operations, accounts and support. Customers and employees do not experience these divisions. They experience a sequence of actions.

A customer does not want to engage with the accounts department. They want to understand an invoice. They do not want to enter an onboarding workflow. They want to begin using what they have bought. They do not want to navigate the organisation. They want the organisation to help them accomplish something.

Design therefore begins with the journey, not the department.

A journey map records what a person is trying to do, the steps involved, the channels they use, the information they receive and the points at which the experience slows, fails or becomes confusing.

Behind that visible journey sits another system – the people, technologies, approvals and operational processes required to deliver it. Mapping both layers can reveal that the customer’s frustration is being created somewhere they cannot see.

A delayed response may not be a customer-service problem. It may originate in an approval process, an incomplete database or a poor handover between teams. A confusing invoice may generate calls to a support centre, even though the underlying problem belongs to information design.

Once the complete system is visible, the business can stop treating symptoms and begin addressing causes.

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Make every step earn its place

Some steps are legally necessary. Some manage genuine risk. Others create value or capture information the business genuinely needs. But many survive simply because they have always been there.

Design challenges the inherited process. Why is this information required? Why must it be entered again? Why are three approvals necessary? Why does a customer need to understand the organisation’s internal language? What would happen if this step disappeared?

The answer is not always automation. Automating a poorly designed process can simply make a bad experience happen faster. The first task is to simplify. Technology can then support the simplified process.

Friction also accumulates in the spaces between activities. A sales team may complete its work efficiently, as may the delivery team. But if information is lost between them, the customer must repeat themselves and the second team must reconstruct what the first already knew.

A well-designed handover defines what must move, in what form, at what time and with whom responsible. It ensures that the next person has what they need before the work reaches them.

The same principle applies across channels. A customer moving from an online form to a telephone conversation should not feel as though they have entered a different organisation. An employee moving from recruitment into onboarding should not encounter a gap between the promises made to them and the reality of starting work.

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Design for when things go wrong

Many systems work efficiently when everything follows the expected path. Their real quality is revealed when it does not.

What happens when information is missing? When a customer does not fit a standard category? When an employee makes an error? When the technology fails?

Poorly designed systems leave people to improvise. Well-designed systems anticipate common exceptions and provide clear paths through them. They make recovery easier, contain the effects of mistakes and prevent one unusual event from disrupting the entire flow.

Design can also identify problems before they become expensive. A process can be mapped on a wall. A form can be tested on paper. A digital journey can be prototyped before the underlying technology is fully developed.

The purpose of a prototype is not to prove that an idea is right. It is to discover where it is wrong while there is still time to fix it.

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Friction has a balance-sheet cost

Unnecessary effort consumes resources without creating equivalent value.

The cost appears in longer handling times, repeated enquiries, abandoned purchases, corrections, delays and additional supervision. It appears in the employees required to compensate for confusing systems and in the customers who decide that completing the transaction is no longer worth the trouble.

McKinsey’s research found that organisations perform better when they manage complete customer journeys rather than isolated touchpoints. Several individual interactions may work perfectly well while the overall experience remains slow, repetitive or incoherent. Customers do not buy touchpoints. They buy outcomes.

Its research into experience-led growth also connects better customer experiences with stronger revenue growth, improved retention and a lower cost to serve. Internally, operating-model redesign can improve customer satisfaction, efficiency, decision-making and employee engagement.

Design Council research reaches a similar conclusion. Businesses using design strategically reported more consistent products and services, improved customer satisfaction, stronger collaboration and fewer project failures. The more deeply design was embedded in the organisation, the greater the reported benefit.

A minute removed from a task completed once is trivial. A minute removed from a task completed a million times is a commercial result.

A clearer instruction may prevent one support call. Applied across an entire customer base, it may reduce the required capacity of a call centre. A better handover may save only ten minutes, but repeated across every new customer, it can release hundreds of hours for more valuable work.

Friction operates through accumulation. So does its removal.

Designing it out begins by seeing the business as customers and employees experience it – not as the organisational chart describes it. The result is a business that moves faster, makes fewer mistakes and requires less effort to deliver more value.

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Précis

Friction hides in unnecessary steps, confusing communications, broken handovers and disconnected systems. Though each moment may appear minor, its repeated cost can be substantial. Design reveals the complete journey experienced by customers and employees, identifies where effort is being wasted and simplifies the processes behind it. By removing friction before automating or expanding, businesses can reduce mistakes, lower costs, improve experiences and create more value with less effort.

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