Every second of hesitation is one where your user can abandon your website. You might have noticed in personal situations that the more something just doesn’t work or look right, the more annoying it becomes to keep on using the service. That’s why it’s important to know what causes these friction points in the customer journey.
Humans like things to be simple. The less your customer has to think, the more likely they are to convert. That’s why in this blog post, while there are many points within the journey you can focus on, such as pricing and shipping, we will focus on the direct bridge between your customers and your company: your website. We'll go over some friction points regarding your website layout, search experience, and personalization. Let’s first discuss why we’re specifically going over this subset of the customer journey.
Jakob’s Law: Customers expect the same from everyone, including you
The more mainstream the internet has become, the more websites have started to look the same. While the early internet was filled with experimental designs by people trying out just about everything, the times have now turned to the opposite.
Website users, especially your online customers, have gotten used to something consistent.
Research by Ipsos shows that consumers expect consistency when it comes to how ecommerce is done, from performance, experience, and workflows across the shops they visit. The same report shows that for the majority of surveyed consumers, website experience is the driving force behind store choice.
The phenomenon has been coined as Jakob’s Law, named after user experience (UX) expert Jakob Nielsen. It is important to not deviate away from the status quo, as otherwise it would require more cognitive load.
The more users have to “figure out” how to navigate through your website, the less likely they will actually finish the whole customer journey. Especially with the decreasing attention span often observed these days, right now it is more than ever important to make sure your website behaves the same as well-known services like Google or Amazon and those of your competitors.
With that in mind, let's go over some well-expected practices and components that website owners should take into account.
7 friction points that harm the online customer experience
1. Visual hierarchy
Clear navigation, clear images, less clustering, and clear descriptions. Visual hierarchy is important. Every detail that feels off adds distractions and mental burden. Every extra click your customer has to do decreases the efficiency of your website and thus makes you lose potential customers and conversions. And of course, let's not forget the mobile formats and make sure you support responsive design as soon as possible.
Then, specifically to your industry, being different from the others in the wrong way can confuse your customers, as they might not expect to see something new. In ecommerce for example, your logo on the top left, a cart and checkout on the top right, filters on the left, and products in the center are most common.
2. Information architecture
Clear terminology is also important. Similar to what I have personally learned about how to write blog posts, users need to spend more energy if they have to derive what "more," "stuff," and "others" mean in the current context. On the other hand, being too descriptive with lots of technical specs causes a technical grouping instead of focusing on the user.
When just setting up your website, you might be inclined to use placeholder or temporary words like the above. The danger, however, is that these placeholders almost always become permanent.
Clearer terminology makes the user experience much more smooth. This can be as simple as attaching the specific type to the above examples. Less mental effort is needed when reading "more shoes." Make sure you get the words right as soon as possible.
3. Search (bar) experience
Users come to your website with a goal and want to fulfill it as soon as possible with as little effort. If you provide lots of services, you might have found that on-site search is a good way for the user to make sense of what they want.
Implementing search can be underestimated, and it is important that you make sure you know your website behaves as expected. Earlier research has shown that 80% of consumers abandon search features if they perform poorly.
It is hard, if not impossible, to know the exact words your customers are going to type in. Gladly, many search solutions make sure that matching based on synonyms or typos.
In addition, the way people search over the internet has changed over the years. While keyword-based optimizations are still widely talked about, topic-based search is more in line with recent advancements in search technology, and thus, user behavior. This essentially goes over the support of searching by typing sentences instead of keywords. Your customers might be inclined to do this, with all major search engines supporting it nowadays.
Users look for answers and not just information. Questions to answer are what I personally am also aiming for with the writing of this blog post. Not taking this into account might turn into unwanted effects when it comes to displaying your results to the customer.
4. Decision paralysis
Similarly, the action past the initial search has some points that you need to take into account. While you might want to give the best, most complete overview of the products you provide, it is important to take into account how this is perceived by the customer.
Decision paralysis means that users start to feel lost when they have to decide between many different choices. More options doesn’t necessarily mean more satisfaction.
Many of your users want to spend the least effort to get the best out of your services. Listing many choices at once harms this and, at first glance, already feels overwhelming. It causes anxiety: Do I select the best product for my situation? How do I even know what’s the difference between these products? It is also called the Paradox of Choice by psychologist Barry Schwartz. Sometimes, less is more.
If we go a little bit more into the psychology of consumers, we also encounter Hick’s Law. In short, once you start to give more choices, the time until a decision is made grows quickly until more options reach a maximum: a logarithmic relation for the mathematicians out there.
What this means for you is that you need to watch out for giving too many options to the customer. From Hick’s law we can conclude that decision paralysis kicks in quickly.
5. Filtering fatigue
Often attached to the search bar is a set of filters to refine the results, such as shoe size, smartphone speed, and styles. Having filters can work, but not knowing what people are looking for can harm the effectiveness of these and even be perceived as clutter. Indeed, somewhat of a decision paralysis even before the best results or any are even shown.
Having too many filters or those that are too basic, all dependent on your buyer personas, can cause friction between what the user wants and what you give them in the results list. This can stop them from continuing the user journey or make wrong decisions, which can then lead to diminishing returns.
6. Personalization
Personalization these days has become a standard practice in the online world, from algorithms to, more recently, direct usage of AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. In some sense this extends the change in search behavior mentioned above.
Users have become more comfortable searching based on long conversational texts, expecting the service to properly understand it and give the right answer. Lacking personalization and only relying on “simple” search diminishes results. Google’s ads marketing VP also predicts that AI transforms customer behavior. The more you wait to add some personalization, the more outdated your service might feel.
Personalization helps your customers feel understood and helps them convert more. Otherwise, they might move directly to these services and ChatGPT for this if you don’t have it directly embedded into your website. And especially with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature released in September 2025, users might look elsewhere if you don’t support something similar.
Then, on the other hand, too much personalization might feel invasive and can scare customers off. So make sure you respect your users' rights and stay up to date with what users find acceptable.
7. Website performance
Loading time is immediately noticed by your consumers. And when they are still exploring lots of products, this can quickly cause frustration.
Something that we see consistently show up online is the importance of having your website perform well in terms of load speed, UX, accessibility, and the like. Thankfully, online services like WooCommerce for ecommerce and HubSpot for marketing help you with a good baseline.
The Google PageSpeed Insights tool allows you to see how well your user performs when it comes to performance, in addition to accessibility, SEO, and best practices. While making sure you tick all the boxes on these topics, we have noticed that these do not give the full picture of how your website is perceived. Required components like embedded iframes, CAPTCHAs and third-party cookies make it almost impossible to get a 100% score through these grading tools and might give the wrong incentive on what to focus on.
Do some user tests and allow for user feedback points to gather specific information on what your website needs to improve on.
In short
Friction is the gap between what the user wants to do and how you aid their goals. Make sure your website is modern and up to trends and recent standards. Users expect your website to behave like others in your industry. Align your site with established mental models as seen in Hick’s Law and Jakob’s Law. Embrace user experience improvements via personalization. This way, you turn a "stuttering" journey into a seamless conversion.
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