About a year ago, I was trying to book driving lessons for my son. I found a local driving school that offered exactly what I needed: a five-lesson package for new drivers who already had some experience behind the wheel. Perfect. I clicked the Book Now button, landed in Calendly, chose a date and time, and then realized I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. The package included five lessons, but the booking system appeared to be scheduling one. Was I supposed to book all five separately? Would they contact me to arrange the others? Did buying the package happen somewhere else? I eventually called the driving school and asked.
The answer was simple: I needed to book each lesson separately. Five lessons meant going through the Calendly booking process five separate times. Maybe someone else would have figured that out immediately. I didn’t, and nothing in the process told me what to do. A sentence explaining how the five-lesson package worked would have answered the question. A booking system designed around packages would have made the process easier still. Instead, I had reached the point where I was actively trying to give this business my money and had to stop and call them to find out how.
People often think they’re “bad at tech,” when really a website is just confusing.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched someone struggle with a website and then heard some version of, “Maybe I’m just bad at tech.” People are not “bad at tech.” I went to school for this, and I can’t figure it out, then it’s a User Experience problem, not a people problem (more about that below).
Sometimes people genuinely don’t know how to use a piece of technology. Plenty of technology requires some knowledge or learning. Plenty of the time, though, people are blaming themselves for something the interface made unnecessarily difficult. If you can’t tell where a button is going to take you, can’t find your way back to where you started, don’t know how to complete a booking or have to guess what happens next, your technical ability may not be the problem. The user experience may be failing you.
User experience, or UX, is exactly what it sounds like: the experience someone has while using a product, system or service. On a website, UX includes whether people can understand the navigation, find what they’re looking for, complete tasks and reasonably predict what will happen when they click something. Good UX doesn’t mean nobody will ever be confused. It means we aren’t creating unnecessary confusion and then expecting the user to solve it.
That same kind of friction extends beyond the website, which is where the larger customer journey comes in.
Your website is only one part of the customer journey
A customer journey is the series of interactions someone has with a business, from first discovering it through researching, buying, using what they bought and potentially coming back. Someone might discover a business through Instagram, visit its website, join its email list, receive a promotion, visit the store, make a purchase and contact customer service three weeks later. Inside the business, different people, software and strategies may be responsible for every one of those things. The customer experiences one business.
Customer journey friction can happen anywhere along that journey. A confusing navigation menu creates friction on the website. An unclear email can create an expectation that follows someone into a physical store. A social post can successfully send someone to a website that makes it difficult to find what they came for. A website can convince someone to buy a service and then hand them off to a booking system that leaves them wondering how to book it.
Every individual piece can technically work while the journey as a whole doesn’t work particularly well. And when those points of friction show up around buying, booking or contacting the business, they can interfere with conversions even though nothing is technically broken.
You know how your business works. Your customers don’t.
Retail promotions are a good example of how this kind of friction can happen outside a website. A business sends an email announcing an offer. The person writing it knows exactly which products are included, what the exclusions are and how the promotion works. A customer only has the words in front of them. If those words leave room for a broader interpretation, the customer may arrive expecting one thing and find another.
From inside the business, the email may still look successful. It went out, people opened it and some of them showed up because of it. The friction only becomes visible later in the journey, when what the customer thought the email promised doesn’t match what they encounter in the store. A small ambiguity in one interaction has followed them into another.
My driving-school problem worked the same way. Someone at the school presumably knows that a five-lesson package means booking five individual appointments in Calendly. Once you know that, the process probably seems self-explanatory. A first-time customer has no reason to know it.
Websites are particularly good at exposing this blind spot because the people who own and work with them already know where everything is. They know that Order Now takes you to the product menu, even if another link called Shop All takes you somewhere completely different. They know how to get back to the home page. They know why the navigation changes in different sections of the site. They aren’t experiencing the website with the same information a first-time visitor has.
Every time the interface or communication relies on knowledge the customer doesn’t have, we’re asking the customer to bridge the gap.
Small problems still create friction
A disappearing logo might sound like a tiny website problem. If I’ve been using that logo to get back to the home page and it suddenly disappears, it’s not tiny to me anymore. I’ve lost a navigation cue I already learned to use. If the navigation also changes depending on which part of the site I’m in, now I have to stop and figure out where I am and how to get back. It might not seem like a big deal to you, but even a small amount of friction is worth fixing for a good user experience.
That doesn’t mean every point of friction has the same consequence. Some create a moment of confusion or frustration. Others sit directly in the path of something the customer is trying to accomplish. Once friction starts making products difficult to find, leaving someone unsure how to book, or getting in the way of a purchase, it can start affecting conversions as well as the customer experience.
I once audited a local retail website as part of a digital marketing project. The business had a large range of products available online, but finding them required learning some fairly strange navigation logic. Clicking Shop All didn’t take you to all of the products; it took you to Featured Categories. Another button labelled Order Now led to a larger product menu, although nothing about the label indicated that this was where the full shopping experience lived. Moving into different sections of the site also changed the navigation, making it difficult to understand where you were or how to get back.
The site technically worked. The links worked. The products existed. A determined shopper could eventually figure it out—but that business is potentially leaving money on the table if some people (or many) find the website too frustrating to figure out.
A customer shouldn’t have to be determined to buy something from you.
Someone who already knows the site can navigate around those problems without thinking much about them. A new visitor may reasonably conclude that the product they’re looking for isn’t available, get frustrated trying to find it or decide ordering from another business is easier. At that point, what looks internally like a handful of small website problems has become a much larger problem in the customer journey—and potentially a conversion problem too.
The customers who leave don’t file a report
The driving school knows I had trouble with its booking process because I called them. A customer standing in a store can ask what a promotion means. Those interactions give a business useful information because somebody actually tells you they’re confused.
The harder problem is the person who doesn’t ask.
A customer clicks Shop All, doesn’t find what they expected and leaves. Someone reaches a booking system, can’t figure out how the package works and decides to deal with it later. Someone encounters one confusing interaction after another and eventually decides the whole business feels like too much work. They don’t send an email explaining why. They don’t complete an exit survey. They close the tab.
Google Analytics can help uncover some of that behaviour. You can look at how people enter and move through a website, where they leave, whether they’re reaching important pages and whether they’re completing the actions you want them to take. Analytics won’t pop up a helpful notification saying, “Susan left because your Shop All button did not, in fact, let her shop all the things.” You still have to interpret the data and investigate what might be happening.
Customer questions, support calls, analytics, usability testing and plain old observation can start filling in the picture. Periodically walk through your own customer journey and try to forget everything you already know about how it works. Click the email. Follow the promotion. Try to find the product. Fill out the form. Book the appointment. Pay attention to the moments when the next step requires knowledge the customer hasn’t been given.
Don’t make your customers bridge the gaps!
A good customer journey doesn’t require every interaction to be perfect, but that doesn’t make small points of friction irrelevant. A disappearing logo may create a moment of confusion. A confusing ecommerce structure may make it difficult to find or buy a product. Both are worth fixing. The difference is in the consequence and the urgency, especially when friction sits directly in the path of a conversion.
What matters is recognizing friction instead of dismissing a problem because a customer can figure it out. Every unclear instruction, unexpected destination, unnecessary step and missing piece of information asks the customer to do a little more work. One of those moments might create mild annoyance. Several can add up to an experience that makes the whole business feel difficult to deal with. And when friction happens at exactly the point where someone is trying to book, buy, contact you, request a quote or find a product, it can get directly in the way of a conversion.
Those are terrible places to make someone wonder if they’re just bad at tech.
Your customers don’t know what you meant, and they don’t know how your systems are supposed to work. They know what they experienced. The less work you make them do to bridge the gaps, the easier it is for them to keep moving towards a sale, a booking, a quote, or whatever you ultimately want them to do on your website—which is presumably why you have a website in the first place!
