I’m sure this is me, and I’m going to be quite embarrassed when someone, anyone, hopefully comes along and explains this one to me.
A few weeks ago I learned about a startup that was supposedly the online version of Whole Foods, Thrive Market. Cool! I buy a few things at Whole Foods, so I was interested to check out Thrive… and I would have loved to, however, they didn’t let me in.
They made me enter my email address before I was allowed to shop.
Why would I do that? Why would they do that?
So I tweeted about….
And their reply?
I’m not picking on Thrive here, okay…. maybe a little, but this really perplexed me. Why do this? Why create this friction?
I forgot about it after a few days…. until this morning.
I was having an interesting conversation with someone about how shopping is changing and how people are buying & selling used items — or trading them — so I went to dig around a little on some of the popular sites, and BAM! More friction!
The first was ThredUP…
You need to enter something in order to start shopping… oh, I can collapse this, cool!
Oh cool, this is really nice — I love the hero section with the Under $15, Under $25, etc. and the Brand Spotlight on the right, Lululemon Love, I bet that does well.
Disclaimer I’m a middle-aged heterosexual Male… just for context. :)
So I scroll down and see some other interesting content that looks click worthy to begin digging into the site…
I get the Friction again! Ugh! What the heck is going on? Do they know I’m not a real customer and just keeping me from checking things out?
Okay, let me try another site…
Nearly the same, they want me to sign up first… oh, Continue as Guest… Cool! Civility returns!
So I’m doing some more investigation and learned about a cool site Depop… and so I click through to read a Vogue article…
Right away, friction! Sign up for our newsletter! Ugh!
Pass.
I did finally make it to Depop…
ZERO FRICTION!
Nice!
Actually, when the page first loaded I thought I was on an imposter site… LOL! And, for some reason, CraigsList came to mind…. :)
I don’t care at all about clothes or fashion and yet I even scrolled down through this for a minute or two…
Anyway, Depop aside, what’s with all the friction on the web these days? There are a lot of smart people out there, they have to be able to prove this doesn’t harm conversions, right? Am I missing something? This goes against everything that I learned about designing sites. Please, someone, anyone, explain this Deliberate Friction!
