Comprehension Over Friction
Removing friction only helps when intent is high; for most of your product the real problem is comprehension
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 93%
The reflex to always 'remove friction' is only correct when a user already has high, specific intent (they know exactly what they want and are determined to get it). For most of a product — especially the unique parts — the user's intent is barely above threshold and low in specificity, so the real challenge is helping them understand what the thing is and what to do next.
Origin
Butterfield developed this at Slack, which was hard to explain to newcomers, contrasting a determined Taylor Swift ticket buyer (high intent) with someone arriving at slack.com barely over the intent threshold.
Core principles
- 01Friction reduction pays off only where intent and specificity of intent are both high
- 02For low-intent, low-specificity moments, comprehension — 'what is this?' and 'what do I do next?' — is the actual bottleneck
- 03The unique parts of any product are almost always comprehension problems, not friction problems
How to run it
- 1
Rate the user's intent and specificity at this moment
Ask two questions: how badly does the user want this (intent), and how precisely do they know what they want (specificity)? Both range from near-zero to 100%.
Pro tip A checkout for a specific concert ticket is ~100% on both; a first visit to a B2B product landing page is ~0.1% over threshold on both.
- 2
Reduce friction only where both are high
For registration, authentication, and e-commerce checkout, streamline aggressively — address pickers, Apple Pay, Shop Pay — because friction above the user's partial intent kills the conversion.
Watch out Even here, when intent is truly maxed out (the Taylor Swift buyer), a slow or error-prone flow barely costs you because they'll persist anyway.
- 3
For everything else, build comprehension
Answer 'what is this thing?' and 'what am I supposed to do next?' through copy, visual hierarchy, affordances, and clear indication of the next action.
Pro tip Most (70-80%) of product design is in the comprehension step, not the friction step.
Watch out If users don't know what they're signing up for, whether they'll be spammed, or whether they'll have to pay next, they back out no matter how frictionless the form is.
In the wild
Someone arrives after months of scattered mentions, a news article, a tweet, an ad — their intent is 0.1% over threshold and they don't even know if Slack is a spreadsheet or a calendar. Rushing them to the sign-up form fails because they don't comprehend what they're signing up for.
→ Slack invested in comprehension (what it is, what to do next) rather than pure friction removal at the top of funnel.
The alarm screen says 'sleep is off... to automatically turn on sleep features and edit your schedule, you need to turn sleep on' — ungrammatical and incomprehensible, so 90%+ of people just set a plain alarm and never discover the value behind Sleep.
→ Lack of comprehension, not friction, blocks users from a valuable feature.
Common mistakes
Optimizing to the sign-up form as fast as possible
Getting a low-comprehension visitor to the form quickly just makes them bounce, because they don't understand what they're committing to.
Applying friction-reduction dogma everywhere
The 'remove friction' mantra is so deeply ingrained that teams apply it to comprehension problems, where it does nothing or hurts.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and PMs of products that are novel or hard to explain, especially B2B SaaS where the value isn't self-evident
Not ideal for
Commodity, high-intent transactions (concert tickets, known-item checkout) where users already know exactly what they want
From the transcript
“It is a a poor approach when the challenge is really comprehension”
“What we had to worry about was creating comprehension in in two senses. What is this thing? Um and what am I supposed to do…”
“the amount of friction is uh above that, I just I'm not going to do it”
From the episode
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield