This piece responds to two PechaKucha talks by Nature senior consultants: Perri Moustoukis on friction as a trust mechanism and Jyron Calleja on attention, earned or taken. Start with theirs.
For years, companies have been engaged in a relentless race to remove friction from the customer experience. The goal has been to make every interaction faster, easier, and smoother, whether that means reducing the number of clicks required to make a purchase, eliminating waiting times, or using technology to automate decisions that once required human involvement. Now, AI promises to remove even more of the effort involved in thinking, writing, researching, choosing, and creating.
The assumption behind this pursuit is that friction is inherently bad and that ease is inherently good. Yet perhaps we have been too quick to treat all friction as a problem that needs to be solved.
There is an important distinction between unnecessary friction and meaningful friction. Nobody wants confusing processes, bureaucracy, or a frustrating checkout experience, and removing these obstacles can make life genuinely better. However, there are other forms of friction that I'd argue are fundamental to how humans create meaning. Effort can make us care more deeply about an outcome, waiting can create anticipation, participation can create a sense of ownership, and mastery often comes from the struggle involved in learning something difficult.
As I've written about before, this is one of the ideas that resonates in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The motorcycle is not simply a machine designed to transport a rider from one place to another as efficiently as possible. The process of understanding the machine, maintaining it, and developing the competence to care for it becomes part of the experience itself. The difficulty is not merely an obstacle between the rider and the destination; it contributes to the meaning of the journey.
Perhaps, in our obsession with efficiency, we have confused the removal of effort with the creation of value.
Technology certainly gives us more efficient ways to complete tasks, but the question is whether we actually use the time we gain to live more meaningful lives. If sending an email takes one minute rather than ten, do we spend the remaining nine minutes talking to our children, investing in a relationship, reading, thinking, or simply doing nothing? Or do we send nine more emails, living out and ultimately reinforcing hustle culture?
In this sense, technology can create something like a Jevons paradox for human attention: when tasks become cheaper in time and cognitive effort, we often do not consume less of them. Instead, we increase the number of tasks we believe we can fit into our lives. Rather than escaping the tyranny of the to-do list, we create a longer one.
This has profound implications for brands. For decades, organisations have pursued frictionless experiences, but taken too far, this can remove the very moments in which customers participate in an experience and develop an emotional connection with it. Streaming a song is more convenient than putting on a record, just as ordering dinner is easier than cooking it, and flicking a switch is easier than making a fire. Yet the less efficient experience can contain more anticipation, skill, ritual, memory, identity, and story.
Perhaps, then, the future of customer experience is not simply about identifying more friction to eliminate. It is about understanding which friction to remove and which friction to protect.
We should remove confusion, bureaucracy, and unnecessary effort, but we should think carefully before removing ritual, anticipation, discovery, learning, human interaction, and participation. Because in our race to make everything effortless, we may inadvertently make both our experiences and the brands within them less meaningful, and less memorable.
Chris Crook, Founder & Managing Partner, Nature.
