I color code each step so that people can easily see the spots where users are stumbling or getting really frustrated.

I paired this document with a horizontal visual of the user journey including the emotional journey I went on as a user. This is roughly based on 

The goal isn't to be precise but to easily visualize the trends.

Each friction log can surface optimization opportunities within the flow. These were some of my immediate experiment hypotheses after completing the exercise.

Before I started at Snyk, there was a team that nominally owned onboarding. The onboarding flow had been created a long time ago, but there had never really been a focus on it. I just wanted to establish the status quo with where onboarding was today.

It took us some time to get to our metric definition of activation, so in the short term, the goal was to remove negative friction while we worked on understanding activation more deeply in parallel.

The Friction Log is one tool in the discovery process we used to identify negative friction in addition to user interviews and other qualitative research.

I went through the exercise by myself first. Then with internal employees. Then with customers. Throughout the process, we identified common themes among them. Each one can help generate opportunities.

It is a great tool for helping build user empathy with the team. Internal team members can fill out the doc directly. Customers you want to record and have them verbalize what they are thinking about and feeling. New hires on the team are also a great opportunity for fresh eyes.

When you do this with other people, the first thing you should do is set the expectation of what you want them to do.

Effectively you want them to think out loud. Don't ask them to write what they are thinking. You want to prompt them in three areas:

Thinking - What are the thoughts going through their head?

Feeling - How are they feeling as they try to complete the action? Confused? Delighted? Something else?"

Ben Williams

This friction log is one tool I use in the discovery process to identify negative friction, in addition to doing user interviews and other qualitative research.

Thoughts on the onboarding journey and friction

While an overall positive experience, I encountered some notable onboarding friction in this specific onboarding flow. Snyk shouldn’t assume the user knows any limitations of the product, and there are several opportunities to experiment to avoid or lessen the friction encountered.

Experimentation and optimization opportunities

Any experiments to be further detailed to create testable hypotheses with goals, metrics, desired learnings (validated path and non-validated path), target cohorts, etc.

User onboarding friction log at Snyk

Snyk User Onboarding Friction Log

Doing the exercise

Legend & journey map

My experience...

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