Whilst a user is experiencing your website, friction is the thing that prevents them from accomplishing their goals. Friction is a huge problem because it leads to a reduction of conversations, bouncing and overall frustrates your users to the point of abandoning their tasks. In this article, you will be informed on how to better the UX for your users whilst reducing friction.
The Concept
Frictionless user experience has become the standard. The goal of frictionless experiences is to ultimately simplify our lives and our user experience. The most successful digital experiences have come from focussing on reducing friction to better user experience.
Good and Bad Friction
It’s important for us to start by pointing out that there are just two types of friction- “good” friction and “bad” friction.
“Good” Friction
There are a few times when a little UI/UX is a positive. Sometimes you may want to slow the user down to ensure data that has been captured correctly, or to prevent users from taking the incorrect path. For actions with severe consequences, some friction is not a bad thing.
“Bad” Friction
This is what we mean by unwanted friction which is created by visual clutter for a user. Bad friction is the enemy of interacting design due to it creating extra cognitive load in the user interface. Therefore, by reducing bad friction, you are ultimately doing something that’s good for your UI.
How to Prevent Bad Friction
Applying the following three principles will help you drive any product or service to a more frictionless experience for users.
- Consider a complete user journey
- Limit the total number of steps required to complete the task
- Design clear navigation
- Following the less is more approach
- Use recognisable UI patterns
- Use chunking
Has this article helped you get rid of bad friction from your designs? Be sure to contact us today with your thoughts.
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