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Removing friction means making the action a person needs to take easier and more consistent—not adding steps indiscriminately. In digital services, excessive or unjustified barriers can keep consumers from completing tasks such as canceling a subscription. In content teams, inconsistent handoffs and repeated work can slow production and publishing. The remedy depends on which problem you are solving: reduce needless effort, but preserve steps that provide useful information, time to reflect, or protection for consequential decisions.
What does “friction” mean in these two settings?
The phrase “removing inconsistencies, reducing friction” does not name one established method. It can describe work in at least two distinct settings: improving the choices and tasks available to consumers in digital services, or improving how an organization creates and publishes content. The problems overlap in their focus on needless effort, but the people affected and the fixes differ.
Digital services: barriers that obstruct a user’s intended task
The UK Department for Business and Trade’s evidence review of online choice architecture uses “sludge” for excessive or unjustified friction that makes it harder for consumers to get what they want or act as they wish. Examples include hiding important product information in terms and conditions or requiring a premium-rate phone call to cancel a service.
Sludge is not simply any confusing screen or extra click. The review distinguishes it from “dark nudges,” which make inadvertent or ill-considered actions easier, and from dark patterns: interface choices that coerce, steer, or deceive users into unintended and potentially harmful decisions. These concepts are related, but they describe different ways design can affect user choices.
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Content operations: repeatable coordination across a team
Content operations coordinates the people, processes, and tools involved in making and distributing content. In Contentful’s overview, the workflow runs from ideation through production, review, publication, and retirement. Unlike managing one campaign as a standalone project, content operations aims to make work repeatable and transferable across an organization.
That distinction matters: a consumer-service redesign should focus on the user’s task and choice, while a content-operations redesign should focus on ownership, handoffs, and repeatable workflow rules.
Why is an action sometimes harder than it needs to be?
Friction can appear as time and navigation effort, difficult-to-find or difficult-to-obtain information, or psychological burdens such as frustration and humiliation. In a consumer-facing service, a useful warning sign is an uneven path: a business-favored action is simple, while an alternative a user may prefer is needlessly difficult.
Sign-up is easy; cancellation is hard
A service that accepts online sign-ups but requires customers to call to cancel forces a channel switch at precisely the point when the customer wants to leave. The UK review discusses this kind of asymmetry as an example of sludge. In a study of 526 US news organizations by Scire (2021), as reported by the review, 41% made online subscription cancellation easy; the review also says more than half trained customer-service representatives in tactics to dissuade callers from unsubscribing. These findings concern that study’s organizations, not every subscription service.
Information or forms make a task unexpectedly burdensome
Important terms that appear only late in a process can prevent an informed decision. Forms can also impose effort that people underestimate. In a specific study example attributed to Tasoff and Letzler (2014) by the UK review, participants expected about an 80% chance of redeeming money within 30 days, while the observed redemption rate was 31%. Those figures describe that study, not the typical outcome for all forms or claims.
Content work repeats because responsibilities and handoffs are unclear
In a content team, friction may show up as duplicated assets, inconsistent review rules, unclear ownership, or manual coordination between stages. Contentful recommends clear ownership, governance, input from the people doing the work, and automation where appropriate. These are vendor recommendations; they are not independent evidence that any particular tool will produce a measured improvement.
When should friction be reduced—and when should it stay?
Not all friction is harmful. The government review notes that some added steps can support deliberation or self-control, particularly when a decision has significant consequences. A useful test is to ask what each step protects or enables.
- Keep a step when it gives a person material information, time to reflect, or a meaningful safeguard for a consequential choice.
- Review a step when its purpose is unclear, it creates a disproportionate burden, or it makes a user’s preferred action harder without a corresponding benefit.
- Remove or simplify it when it is excessive or unjustified and mainly impedes the task the person is trying to complete.
This test avoids treating speed as the only measure of a good experience. A fast process can still mislead or pressure someone; a thoughtful pause can be useful when the stakes warrant it.
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How to find and reduce avoidable friction
For a consumer-facing digital service
- Map the task from beginning to end. Follow what a person must do to complete a goal, including where they find information, which channels they use, and what happens after submission.
- Compare paths for different choices. Look for differences in navigation, time, forms, information, and channel requirements between actions the business favors and actions users may prefer.
- Identify the reason for each barrier. Ask whether it informs the user, supports reflection, or protects against a meaningful risk. A step without a clear user-serving purpose deserves scrutiny.
- Check the language and emotional burden. Look for wording or interaction patterns that frustrate, shame, pressure, or mislead people rather than helping them understand the decision.
- Make the necessary path clear and consistent. Align instructions and available channels with what the service promises, and make material information accessible before a person commits.
For a content team
- Document the workflow. Map the stages from ideation through production, review, publication, and retirement, including the people and tools involved.
- Make ownership and handoffs explicit. Record who is responsible at each stage and what must be ready before work moves to the next person or team.
- Make rules visible and repeatable. Set shared expectations for review and governance so each project does not have to rediscover the process.
- Involve the people who perform the work. Ask where delays, duplication, or errors occur before changing the workflow.
- Consider automation selectively. Target manual steps that create delays or errors, and evaluate any platform against the organization’s actual workflow needs rather than vendor promises.
Contentful says centralized content and reusable assets can reduce duplication and reconciliation work in content operations. That is a description of its own platform, not a universally established or quantified outcome. A team should judge a solution against its own process and evidence of results.
How to compare process or software options
When deciding between workflows or tools, use the same criteria for each option. These questions are a practical comparison framework, not a published standardized scoring model.
Quick Recap
- Effort: How much work does the process impose on the user or team?
- Consistency: Does it behave predictably across channels, cases, and projects?
- Ownership: Are responsibilities and handoffs clear?
- Accessibility: Can people with different abilities, language needs, and levels of digital familiarity complete the task?
- Safeguards: Does the process protect people where decisions have meaningful consequences?
- Outcomes: Is there evidence that the option improves the work, or only a vendor’s claim that it should?
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