At a Glance

  • Friction often appears when context is lost across channels, sessions, or internal systems.

  • Authentication, discovery, transaction, and post-purchase journeys should be designed as one connected experience.

  • Passkeys and verified deep links can reduce effort while improving security and continuity.

  • The best measure of friction is not the number of taps. It is unnecessary customer effort.

A customer sees a product in a social post and taps the link.

The mobile website opens. The company already has an app installed, but the link does not recognize it. The customer is asked to sign in again, search for the product, choose the same options, and re-enter information.

Every individual step appears reasonable to the team that owns it.

Together, they destroy the original intention.

The customer wanted to view one product. The organization made them reconstruct the journey.

This is the real meaning of friction.

Friction Is Often a Continuity Problem

Teams tend to examine friction within individual screens.

The larger failures occur between systems:

  • An advertisement and its landing page.

  • A website and an installed app.

  • Authentication and the intended destination.

  • Purchase and fulfilment.

  • An error and customer support.

  • One session and the next.

Each handoff can lose information.

A frictionless journey preserves enough context that users do not have to repeat work the organization should already understand.

1. Entry and Authentication Friction

Authentication protects customers and businesses. Poor authentication can still create unnecessary effort.

Password requirements, repeated OTPs, unexpected logouts, and difficult recovery flows create barriers before the customer reaches value.

Passkeys offer an alternative. The FIDO Alliance describes passkeys as cryptographic credentials that replace passwords and use the same biometric, PIN, or device method people use to unlock their devices. They are designed to resist phishing while simplifying sign-in. See the FIDO Alliance passkey overview.

Implementation still requires careful design.

Customers need to understand what a passkey is, where it is stored, what happens on another device, and how account recovery works.

The best authentication experience balances security, familiarity, and recovery. Removing visible steps is not enough if failure leaves the customer locked out.

2. Discovery and Context Friction

A link should preserve the intention that created it.

Android App Links can route verified web URLs directly to corresponding in-app content. If the app is not installed, the same URL can continue to the website. See the Android App Links overview.

Apple Universal Links serve a similar purpose, allowing standard web links to open relevant content in an installed app while falling back to the browser when needed. See Apple’s Universal Links guidance.

These are technical capabilities with strategic experience value.

They allow campaigns, notifications, emails, QR codes, and shared links to lead customers into the correct context.

The destination should also preserve relevant state. A customer responding to an abandoned-cart message should not arrive at an empty homepage. A person opening a document notification should see that document.

Continuity is part of relevance.

3. Transaction Friction

Checkout is where customer intent meets business requirements.

The company needs payment, fulfilment, consent, risk control, and accurate information. The customer wants to complete the purchase with confidence.

Baymard calculates an average documented online cart-abandonment rate above 70%. Its research also found that 17% of surveyed US shoppers had recently abandoned a purchase because checkout felt too long or complicated. See Baymard’s checkout research.

Not all abandonment is caused by design, and not all can be recovered.

Teams should focus on avoidable issues:

  • Forced account creation.

  • Repeated information.

  • Unexpected costs.

  • Unclear delivery.

  • Limited payment choices.

  • Weak error messages.

  • Lost cart state.

  • Poor mobile input.

  • Lack of confidence at confirmation.

A strong checkout minimizes unnecessary effort while keeping price, consequence, and status clear.

4. Post-Transaction Friction

Many journeys become difficult after payment.

Customers cannot find order status, change a booking, request a return, retrieve a receipt, or contact the right support channel.

The business may regard the conversion as complete. The customer’s outcome is still in progress.

A confirmation experience should communicate:

  • What was completed.

  • A reference or record.

  • What happens next.

  • Expected timing.

  • How to make a change.

  • How to get help.

The GOV.UK confirmation pattern follows this principle by recommending clear next steps, reference details, contact information, and a way to retain a record. See the confirmation-page guidance.

Post-transaction clarity protects trust and reduces avoidable service demand.

Map the Journey Across Channels

A useful friction audit begins before the app opens and ends after the immediate task.

For one priority journey, map:

1. Trigger and expectation.

2. Link or entry point.

3. Authentication state.

4. Information already known.

5. Customer decisions.

6. System decisions.

7. Transaction or task completion.

8. Confirmation and next steps.

9. Recovery and support.

10. Return journey.

At every stage, ask:

  • What does the customer need to remember?

  • What does the company already know?

  • Where is context lost?

  • What effort serves no customer purpose?

  • What risk justifies additional effort?

  • Can the customer recover without starting again?

Measure Friction as Effort

Tap count is easy to measure and easy to misuse.

A three-step journey can feel harder than a six-step journey if the choices are unclear or information must be remembered.

Useful friction measures include:

  • Time to complete.

  • Repeated fields.

  • Authentication failure.

  • Error and retry rate.

  • Backtracking.

  • Abandonment by step.

  • Support contacts.

  • Successful deep-link routing.

  • Return to the same task.

  • Customer-effort feedback.

  • Completion after failure.

These measures connect interaction to the customer’s actual workload.

Make the Organization Carry the Complexity

Seamless experiences often require considerable work behind the interface.

Systems must share context safely. Links need verification. Authentication needs recovery. Operations must expose status. Teams need shared ownership across channels.

The customer should not have to understand that complexity.

A frictionless experience is not one where nothing happens. It is one where the organization has done enough behind the scenes that the customer’s intention survives every handoff.

The ultimate signal is simple: people can move from what they want to what they came to achieve without repeatedly explaining themselves to the product.