Good friction filters for quality, bad friction blocks everyone

Laura was discussing an experiment at Twilio where adding signup questions unexpectedly increased conversion, challenging assumptions about user friction.

Bad friction is bad, and good friction is good. There's no such thing as it being simple. It's just all friction is bad.

So we almost create this artificial friction to help differentiate how deeply a user wants something or needs something. And if the user doesn't fill out that questionnaire, maybe they're actually looking for something else.

We actually put more friction in the onboarding flow to help to start to solve for that. So we actually slowed you down. We made you be more thoughtful about what you were listing. And by doing that, we actually helped you get to a first sale faster.

Do not skip those onboarding questions. No, they do not detract for your onboarding completion rates and people that do drop off in the profiling stage, they were low intent anyways.

Writely was Sam Schillace's web-based word processor startup that was later acquired by Google and became Google Docs.

When we did Writely at the beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address, because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us anything at all about yourself. And after about two minutes of typing, if you're still there, we'd very gently just say, 'Please give us your email address, no password, no anything.'

Just removing steps or yanking or simplifying things to an oblivion where you lose an identity of what you even do or what you're capable of doing is a completely failed growth tactic.