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Comment by sjansen | Hacker News Reader

> A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing

I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.

I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)

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I once ran an ecommerce site, and due to a bug every customer saw a fairly cryptic error message. It was something along the lines of "You must login to perform that action". Our site didn't have a login system.

By fixing that bug, conversions went down. We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error increased revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue.

We never figured out why, but my hypothesis is the user has to feel like that are making progress through the task they are trying to achieve. Getting a pointless error, and then getting past it, gives them a sense of achievement. They're then happier and more invested in your product when it comes to plugging in a credit card number...

Or something else changed at the same time. Hard to know without a control group.

We did a randomised A/B test.

To ensure it wasn't some other wierd effect, we also fixed the bug and then deliberately re-added the same error message.

This bug was worth 15% of our revenue, so we did a lot of tests and trials...

Do you know what an A/B test is? It has a control group by design.

Sounds like a variant of the Ikea effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

Though I'd also be wary of the impact these bugs are having on your brand name, and reputation. You might have stumbled into a local maxima.

Interesting. This sounds like its related to triggering "system 2" as Kahneman would call it in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

    Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the 
    CRT [Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half 
    of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out 
    gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font 
    induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 
    90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made 
    at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion 
    dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read 
    this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. 
    Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2 
    [slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more 
    likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 
    1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make 
    most of our minute-to-minute judgments].[1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8867651-the-experimenters-r...

The under armour website is terrible with coupon codes. Some of the time, it does not work and you get a cryptic error and have to wait on hold to even chat with a customer service rep to decode the message for you and tell you what you need to add/remove from your cart to make it go through. Worst of all, these are not random codes I picked up off some deal site, these are codes they emailed to me directly.

It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.

If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.

> When we discovered streps in our labs

Was this typo intentional so readers don't just disengage and skim through your comment? ;)

That's interesting, though. I wonder why more accurate instructions resulted in more problems. I know you mentioned 'disengagement,' but wouldn't more detail and accuracy make it easier to do the exercise(s)? Or does it make the students just zone out and type the lines out without thinking?

(I know I certainly was guilty of that the first time I went through the Linux From Scratch book.)

So is it the same as GPS guidance makes people turn off their navigational brains?

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