In terms of UX design, any hurdle that prevents users from achieving their motives is friction. Why pay heed to friction? Well, this problem forces the users to leave because of bounces, reduced conversions and ultimate frustration. By the time you complete reading this article, you’ll know how to sidestep friction and improve user experience.
Concept: Why Frictionless experience
Calling a user experience frictionless is like setting a new benchmark. What a frictionless UX essentially does is make things easier for the users. Great digital experiences that have left the users amazed have focused more on plummeting friction in their users’ journeys.
How to Avoid Bad Friction for Amazing UX Design
1. Serve a Complete User Journey
Keeping both business goals and user experience in mind, one must decide when friction can be helpful and where harmful and design the product accordingly. In the user’s journey, every footstep can lead to either enhancing the UX by removing friction or creating it. Understanding what users need and the steps they take can benefit designers. They can eliminate or adjust steps that are destructive to the response rate.
2. Map Your Content Well With Clear Navigation
Navigation is one of the most obvious functional requirements of websites, yet some designers obliviously pass on it. This can pave way for potential friction. It is, yes, difficult to give a complete navigation solution to sites to encompass the entire content but learning from users could be fruitful. User techniques such as card sorting could give you hints on adjusting the navigation according to the tastes of your users.
3. Be Minimalistic
Ultimately, designers and end-users wish simplicity. Less is more. Frictionless designs are synonymous to simplicity. The unwanted elements are drained out, while preserving the essentials. Just as same as user interface, a designer must give more importance to the elements that users wish for, matching their expectations and cut short that of which they ignore. One appropriate example that illustrates this belief is the Google home page which is complete yet targeted, serving the users what they want to get served with.
4. Utilize Recognizable UI Patterns
The user’s previous experience is instrumental in guessing what they would need next. This knowledge, if sparse, can create friction in case of discovering something new. Recognizable UI patterns eventually help the users to deal with complicated tasks easily. The designers must ensure that fitting UI patterns are employed, as much as possible. Elements like a magnifying glass icon near the search box can be intuitive, helping the users significantly save their time.
5. Divide and Conquer – Use chunking
Did you know that an average human in working memory can hold only 7 ± 2 numbers of objects, as quoted by George A. Miller, an intellectual psychologist? In place of bombarding the user’s memory with excess information, designers opt for chunking. This technique supports memory retention and natural human brain limitations.
Bifurcating the complex information into simpler and smaller sections can improve UX. Users can then process information smoothly and hold the better part of the content. Finally, a monumental chunk of content is divided, eliminating the redundant information while focusing on what’s important in order to facilitate the users to conquer the climax of the massive content.