E545: Positive Friction in apps is one of the strangest retention tricks ever.
Get people to expend more effort and it makes them stick with an app more!
Very similar to the Ben Franklin Effect. Get somebody to do something for you and they like you more!
As marketers, we look for every edge we can get, not just in awareness, but in getting people to stick with our brands.
These tricks are very cool and very worth knowing.
🧪 Positive Friction: https://read.first1000.co/p/positive-friction
The Ben Franklin effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect
00:00 Introduction to User Experience and Positive Friction 01:13 Understanding Positive Friction 02:11 Examples of Positive Friction in Apps 03:36 Positive Friction in Onboarding and Registration 04:31 Positive Friction in Purchase Flows 06:35 The Ben Franklin Effect 08:28 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#uiux #digitalmarketing #userexperience #psychology
Normally on this podcast, I talk about how to get awareness. But as a marketer, I also like to think about experience, the experience that my customers have, that my viewers have, that my readers have, people on my site have people using my applications have. I have a couple of software apps. I like to think about the experience that my users of these apps have, but also just people on my site. I think about user experience very often. And there's this really interesting phenomenon in user experience called positive friction, which is adding friction to an app or just adding friction to something that actually makes retention go up, that retains people more. And it's pretty counterintuitive, but it's what I want to share with you on this episode. The show, I think it's really interesting. And it reminds me of the Ben Franklin effect, which is also a super interesting cognitive dissonance effect. So I'm going to share those two things. Understanding people makes, makes you, makes me, makes anyone better marketers. I think it's really important to try to understand people. You can write all the copy you want, make all the videos you want. But if you understand people, the content that you make is going to do so much better. This is what positive friction is. This comes from a product manager, a dual lingo, who writes the first 1000 newsletter about conversion rate optimization and how companies got their first 1000 users. I share this newsletter all the time on the show. I really like it, but I haven't shared this one. It's called positive friction. And the sub header is friction isn't always the enemy. Laziness is. And this is what it says, if there is one secret I learned at dual lingo, it is the power of positive friction. What is positive friction? Positive friction is adding both value and effort to the user experience at the same time. Generally, it is much easier to successfully remove friction from the user experience than to add it. Because surprisingly, even the tiniest uptick in effort can deter users unless offset by substantial value. Even the tiniest uptick in effort can deter users unless offset by substantial value. This is why positive friction can seem counterintuitive when it really isn't. So this is the first example now of using positive friction to get users to form long term habits. For users starting a new streak on dual lingo, we experimented with showing them an extra screen after they did a lesson. Everyone who saw it had to press continue to reach the next screen. What may shock you is that we didn't do anything with the streak goal user selected on the screen. We didn't even store the value anywhere. The result of this experiment was an increase in both short term and long term retention gains. Fast forward a couple of years, we ran a follow up, adding more friction to the experience. We removed the pre selected state. Users were two clicks away from exiting the flow instead of one. So now it took two clicks to exit the flow and the screen that's being shared is it's crazy because it just it's a lot more annoying for the user. You have to click more. You don't get to exit the flow is fast and I use Duolingo every day. I have, I think, a 1,200 day streak on Duolingo. And actually personally, it really annoys me that I have to click so much to exit the flow of a lesson. But at the same time, I've used Duolingo for 1,200 days in a row. So I guess the positive friction has worked. My long term retention is crazy. And I've used this, I've used Duolingo for years. So with two clicks to exit the flow instead of one, the friction again led to short term and long term retention gains. But what about registration and onboarding? Nowhere do you see positive friction more than in registration and onboarding flows? Fitness and wellness apps are among the best industries and taking advantage of positive friction early in the user experience. The first example I want to share is from the sleep app Rise. Rise is onboarding flow is 43 steps. 43 steps for the onboarding flow for Rise. Like many other companies in the space, they realize the more screens they added to the onboarding flow, the more personalized and advanced their product appeared to the end users. People valued personalization more than the extra questions they had to answer. That's really interesting. Luna is another app in the wellness space that has an onboarding flow of 19 screens. This is considered average compared to its peers at the top of the health and wellness app category. 19 screens for the onboarding flow is average purchase flow. Another place where positive friction repeatedly shows up is in the purchasing experience. I found that to be a little more surprising than other flows. Purchase flows are very sensitive and high stakes. Two ingredients I thought would make it a bad candidate for introducing friction. As you will see, it is almost a rite of passage for consumer subscription companies to start their purchasing experience with a snappy frictionless experience, then experiment their way into offering more choice and doing so more explicitly than ever. The first example here is from flighty, the flight tracking app. Flighty went from a one click check out experience to a clunky swiping view with all the different plans, features and prices. Wow. Peloton went through the same experience almost to a T when they introduced their freemium tier. They went from an animated delightful one step purchasing carousel to an outdated planned comparison purchasing experience. And you can see this change that they made. There's a lot on the screen compared to the previous one. Even Uber went through a similar experience when they first introduced Uber one so much more on the screen. Positive friction can also be effective in the core action loop of everyday apps, not just in high stakes, one time flows like registration and purchasing. For instance, not so long ago, Lyft ran an experiment to auto collapse the pickup time selection priority standard or wait and save for a more frictionless experience. But what happened is this encouraged users to make a more thoughtful or informed decision. And the results were loud and clear. People preferred the optionality over the frictionless experience. Headspace experimented introducing a primer screen in between its locked content and a paywall. And this primer screen turned out to be a winner. The reason is educating users on what they will get out of a headspace session cause more people to give a free trial a chance, but it also created more friction. So the article ends, I hope by now you are convinced that friction isn't always the enemy. It's almost always a win win for the users and the business when used appropriately. This is a Ben Franklin effect and I'll tell you how it reminds me of the effect. So this according to Wikipedia, the Ben Franklin effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people like someone more after doing a favor for them. People reason that they help others because they like them, even if they do not, because their minds struggle to maintain logical consistency between their actions and perceptions. This is what Ben Franklin personally noted. He wrote, having heard that he hadn't, and this was of a rival legislator, having heard this rival legislator had in his library, a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book and requesting he would do me the favor of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I returned it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met in the house, he spoke to me, which he had never done before, and with great civility, and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends and our friendship continued to his death. They were friends until he passed away. The reason that this reminds me or that positive, positive friction reminds me of this is because it's like, well, I must be doing all these extra clicks in an app or in an onboarding experience or in a purchasing flow because I really want this. That's the mental gymnastics that the mind is doing. And the thing is these apps are giving value, some value with the screens, the extra screens that people have to click that adds the friction. And so you believe you're getting more value, but at the same time, you're also putting in more effort, and then you're telling yourself, well, I'm putting in more effort because I'm, I must really like this. That's what positive friction reminded me of. But in general, I think is a pretty interesting user experience thing to take note of when building brands, building products, building experiences, if you're a marketer, you're probably trying to build an experience in some way or another. I am maybe you're trying to optimize what happens when somebody clicks an ad or you're trying to optimize an SEO page going to a newsletter or to a purchase flow or something like that. And this is something that's just super interesting to think about. The real question is what sort of things become too much friction and are no longer positive friction. But I think in general, if you're trying to offer value and make the user feel better about what they're doing, the user will appreciate it. And that is episode 545 on my daily digital marketing podcast. It is Tuesday, December 31st. I'm going to have a great New Year's in a few hours. 2025 is going to be a great year. And I'm really excited. I hope it will be a great year for you as well. Thank you so much for watching. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for listening. If you listened on Spotify or Apple podcast, 545 episodes in a row, I will talk to all of you again next year.
