(2017-01-14) Amazons Friction-killing Tactics To Make Product

Amazon’s Friction-Killing Tactics To Make Products More Seamless. In this exclusive interview, Brahmbhatt takes us through how to detect and anticipate points of friction through monitoring steps in a customer’s journey with your product. He shares the three stages of the product experience where customers are most vulnerable to experiencing friction. Brahmbhatt also walks through strategies to reduce friction, or, if it’s unavoidable, how to mask it.

to Brahmbhatt, there are three types of friction:

• Friction due to unfamiliarity
• Friction by design.... learning curve
• Friction due to misalignment with human behavior.

I got a mega-shock when we launched music services on Alexa. Customers were trying to find music in ways none of us had ever imagined

You have to study failure points — for us, it was the number of customer requests that were not fulfilled, or the number of songs cued up that were skipped.”

how do you catch friction before it manifests? First, know where to find it. This is where knowing your customer’s journey comes in.

there are three stages to how a customer interacts with your company’s offering

• Before first contact
• Sign up + one “transition” task
  • How to choose your “transition” task: “You don’t want it to be too complex. Focus on the behavior that you want the customer to repeat.”
• First moment of delight (A-ha moment)
  • look for counterintuitive patterns in your data

I try to avoid changing behavior on day one.

there are three types of listening posts:

• Natural Habitat
  • getting in the field
  • Find the expectation that's been set in your customers’ minds for existing products and services
• Mentions and Reviews
  • Pay particular attention to high frequency actions and recurring patterns
• Industry Standard

Three Steps to Eliminate Friction

• Reduce anxiety. Two factors cause anxiety: decisions and loss.
• Remove avoidable steps... Make a list of all decisions a customer needs to make in order to complete a task in your product. Then question each one.
• Mitigate context switching
  • The top two issues around context switching are continuity and recall

Friction may be added by design to produce later benefits.

Identify the most commonly repeated actions and get new customers to perform the first iteration of those actions.

Striving for a More Frictionless World

How To Mask Friction

pre-select

Chet Richards frames this as "Chi, cheng, and friction at Amazon"

John Boyd concluded that to even stand a chance of reducing “confusion and disorder,” or “Friction” as Carl von Clausewitz called it, you have to go outside the system.

one cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.