User experience research shows: Convenience can be counterproductive
Editor’s note: Sam Salama is an associate director based in London.
When Argos stopped printing its physical catalogue in 2020, it not only marked the death of a beloved British icon, it also highlighted a powerful narrative within marketing: Argos reasoned that online shopping “offered greater convenience.”
It’s easy to see why convenience reigns supreme. Trillion-dollar tech giants have created popular and slick innovations like one click payment and face ID. Behavioral science has also strengthened the idea that people act on something when it’s easy to do.
But like all marketing narratives it leaves little room for nuance. In reality, convenience can be counterproductive. By trying to eliminate inefficiencies, brands end up eliminating the experience itself – the very thing that makes them differentiated and memorable.
In fact, brands can succeed by reversing the common narrative. Rather than always making things easy for consumers, there is value in make them difficult.
User experience: Why easy doesn’t always mean good
The main challenge with convenience is that it oversimplifies the user experience, removing the elements that make it workable and enjoyable. The Starbucks mobile ordering feature has become so popular that baristas are unable to cope with the demand, wait times are longer, and a “mid-teens percent” of mobile orders go uncompleted. In short it has worsened the problem it was set up to solve.
Worse still, the brand’s focus on efficiency has jeopardized its famous “third space” offering – customers can hardly relax when there is, to quote Starbucks, a “free for all” at the store entrance. Fortunately, CEO Brian Niccol recognizes the challenge, signaling a need to return to the brand’s “core identity … a welcoming coffee house where people gather.”
Or consider Booths, the English supermarket which recently got rid of self checkout machines because customers deemed them to be unreliable and impersonal. It turns out that the hassle of human cashiers is actually their main benefit. As Nigel Murray, managing director, put it, “We pride ourselves on great customer service and you can’t do that through a robot.”
This is what ad man Rory Sutherland calls the doorman fallacy: hotels got rid of doormen without realizing that their function extends far beyond the door itself – taxi-hailing, security, customer recognition and signaling the status of the hotel. As he says, “The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.”
To demonstrate just how costly this thinking can be, look at the recent tale of Nike – a brand so hell bent on streamlining the service that it terminated hundreds of agreements with local stores so it could prioritize direct to consumer sales. Ironically, the attempt to make the brand more accessible made it less so. As former Nike Brand Director Massimo Giunconce writes, it meant that customers “could not find Nike sneakers in ‘their’ stores – because Nike wasn’t serving those stores any longer, so they simply opted for other brands.”
These problems are clear to see, but the quest for total convenience has one subtle side effect: it kills discovery.
Let’s look at Netflix. The streaming service allows us easy access to more films than ever before. But it also makes it easy to not find anything new, as it serves suggestions based on our existing preferences and behavior. It’s especially tricky given the Netflix catalogue is heavily skewed toward the modern era.
Introducing difficulty into the user experience
When convenience presents a clear issue for brands, the most important thing is to solve it. In the case of Starbucks, Brian Niccol has hinted at several practical changes to improve the in-store experience – including a clear separation between areas for mobile order pickup and the café experience.
However, when there is no existing problem to address, brands can apply friction more proactively. This doesn’t mean hassle for the sake of it – marketing is fundamentally about helping customers – but there are three ways in which friction can be a force for good.
1. UX and surprise.
At Ikea, you have to walk through the entire maze-like store to get to the checkout. And if you buy something, you have to assemble it all yourself. Meanwhile Costco frequently rotates its stock and changes the store layout, making it hard to know what is available and where to find it.
Both retailers intentionally add difficulty, but it’s this difficulty that creates differentiation. Shoppers stumble on items they don’t expect, giving the store a sense of fun and adventure. Nowadays how many other stores are people genuinely excited to visit?
To be clear this means slowing down part of the experience in a way that accentuates the brand, rather than every aspect of the experience. In fact, Ikea has started to open more branches in city centers to make them more accessible.
2. UX and simplification.
When done correctly, adding friction in one area of the user experience can remove friction in another. This allows brands to stay focused on a single value proposition and become known for it.
First Direct effectively told people: you can’t visit us in store because we don’t have branches. Instead, we’ll give you brilliant customer service over the phone. The company’s 2 million customers now enjoys an average 39-second telephone wait time vs. 8 minutes for the wider industry.
Returning to retail, Aldi makes it hard (actually, impossible) to buy branded goods and to have them delivered to your home. But this obstacle allows the brand to keep ruthlessly competitive prices and frees up staff to assist customers in stores.
3. UX and scarcity.
Convenience is often talked about in the context of banking, and yet the UK’s largest digital bank owes its success to hassle.
Monzo initially required customers to join a three-week waiting list, creating the sense that the product was special. It then gave customers a golden ticket – but only one – to pass to friends so they could skip the waiting list and get immediate access. According to Tom Blomfield, founder, “It just worked incredibly well – about 40% of our sign-ups in 2017 came from golden tickets and it cost us nothing.”
It's a principle you see in all walks of life. Everything from our love of diamonds to the demand for Glastonbury tickets – the difficulty in obtaining them is what makes them desirable.
Innovation in UX: Zig when others zag
Rory Sutherland has a handy rule for innovation: “The opposite of a good idea is also a good idea.” Just as convenience can be helpful for brands, so too can hassle.
So next time you hear a discussion about making the experience seamless, effortless or efficient, consider flipping it and making it difficult: surprise, simplification and scarcity.