Reducing Friction
How to design your product for maximal use
The concept of “Growth”, also referred to as “Growth Marketing” or “Growth Hacking”, has been thrown around for well over a decade in the startup world.
I believe that most people get its true purpose and format wrong.
As covered in a previous post, the purpose of a Growth team is to maximize company revenue.
And how can that be achieved? This is where the format, or the structure, of a Growth team comes into play.
There are a plethora of ways to set up a Growth team. At its core, though, I believe that Growth managers should look to split their teams in two distinct functions:
Getting users to sign up to the product – let’s call that User Acquisition
Getting those users to use the product – let’s call that User Growth
So many Growth teams focus on 1 without looking at 2 sufficiently. It’s one thing to generate tons of leads, sign ups and app downloads, but if you don’t invest heavily on User Growth, a high percentage of these potential users will abandon the product. This ultimately means a loss of potential revenue – the opposite of what a Growth team should strive for.
So we need to have a group of individuals on a Growth team who’s sole focus is getting users to use the product.
This is where reducing friction comes into play. To illustrate this idea, let’s look at one of the world’s most recognized brands: IKEA.
Behind IKEA’s massive success
IKEA is a company that has understood the concept of low friction and executes flawlessly on it.
Think about the last time you walked into an IKEA store. Most likely, you went up an escalator and into the Showroom. You started your tour by going through the living room section, followed by the kitchen, dining, work, bedroom and storage sections, and then you probably made your way down to the Market Hall on the ground floor (after the mandatory quick stop for some Swedish meatballs at the in-store restaurant!) and finally into the Self Serve Furniture area.
IKEA understands how important User Growth is. So much so, that it is estimated that 60% of all IKEA purchases are unplanned.
I’m not suggesting that Growth teams should aim to get their users to buy stuff they don’t really need on impulse. But I am suggesting that they look to understand how IKEA not only manages to get customers in the door, but gets them to actually buy stuff and make IKEA’s ad spend worthwhile.
IKEA understands that the easier you make it for someone to buy, the more likely they are to do so.
In other words, customers shouldn’t have to think about where to go next. At IKEA, the vast majority starts in the showroom and follows a unidirectional path that takes them through the entire store to end up at the cash registers.
Now let’s look at how this translates to digital products.
Reducing friction for maximal user growth
If we take the typical customer journey for digital products, it looks something like this (overly simplified):
Person sees ad
Person signs up
Person onboards
Person activates (starts using the product)
Person eventually churns
The customer journey is usually referred to as a funnel, but the ideal (and utopian, but let’s ignore that for this example’s sake) state is a cylinder: 100% of the users who sign up end up onboarding and using the product.
We already agreed that the User Acquisition team is in charge of the first two points, which leaves the following two in the User Growth team’s hands.
If 100 users sign up, the User Growth team should make sure that all 100 onboard and activate. That way, we’re setting ourselves up for revenue maximization.
IKEA manages to maximise revenue in part by making the buying experience easy and intuitive. That is what we call low friction.
Let’s look into some examples of onboarding and activation, and try to understand how we can remove friction from them.
Onboarding
Onboarding should be easy and intuitive. Like IKEA, users should only have to follow a unidirectional path from first experience to purchase. Customers shouldn’t have to think and stop during onboarding – not because we don’t want them to, but because it is not needed.
As a rule, great user onboarding should shorten your new users’ time to value, guide them to their aha moment, and get them to activate faster. (source)
The faster a user can get to their aha moment, the more likely they are to stick to the product and keep using it.
A common way to reduce friction at the onboarding stage is to break the process down into small, digestible and easy-to-follow steps. Dropbox is a great example of this.
The progress bar at the top is also a nice touch – it informs the user of how much work they have left before becoming a “Dropbox master” and being able to use the product freely.
Another good practice is to let the user directly into the product, but show them how to use it with highlighted calls. Slack (image below) does this to perfection.
Other tools, like Appcues, can help companies with this type of onboarding instruction.
There are many, many more examples of innovative and clever ways to smoothen the onboarding process – it’s impossible to cover them all. The important thing to remember is that, as Growth Marketers, we need to understand the importance of a smooth onboarding in maximizing company revenue.
Activation
Once users have gotten acquainted with your product and are fully onboarded, we need get them to use the product.
As you now know, the best way to get them to do that is to make it frictionless. According to Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products:
Making your product so simple that users already know how to use it sounds way easier than it is in practice. But it’s the recipe to strong retention, revenue maximization and ultimately explosive growth.
What are your thoughts on reducing friction? What’s some of the best practices you’ve witnessed? Send me an email and let me know!
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you aren’t already.
Cheers!
Sam 🍂