It shouldn’t feel this hard
An expert knows how to navigate their way through a service they have created. It makes sense to them. They know why certain decisions were made, they know the organisational structure and have knowledge of any office politics at play. There are many variables affecting how services are brought into being that do not relate directly to the specific service itself. The “curse of knowledge” is fully on display when it comes to how most services are designed versus how they are experienced (Heath & Heath 2006).
The curse of knowledge creeps up on everyone who does a job for a good amount of time. We begin to know and understand issues and connections between things that others cannot know (The Decision Lab N.D.). At the same time, we struggle with understanding that others do not have the same level of understanding that we do of the issues. This cognitive bias leads the creators of services to sometimes assume knowledge on the user side that they do not have.
As a service user, applying for a daycare spot for your child, submitting a document, finding the right bus, updating your government information, getting a passport, all these things can feel harder than they need to be. This isn’t bad luck; it is bad design. When looking from the perspective of the creator of these services, it is impossible to unknow what we already know. This makes it difficult to imagine how someone without our knowledge will experience the service that has been created.
What friction actually feels like
There are many ways to experience friction. These are five common ones:
1. Unclear steps
Unclear steps can look like not receiving a confirmation email to know that something you sent was received. It can also be that you are not informed about what the next steps in a complicated process will be. So, you are left wondering if your submission was properly sent or wondering how long the process will take to get from problem submission to resolution.
2. Too many platforms
At work we can often experience the frustration of too many platforms. Maybe we work in a Microsoft environment but then we need to participate in a Zoom meeting where we collaborate in Miro or Mural and then we share documents that are saved in Google Drive. This is just one example. Sometimes when you engage in a service, the connections between the different platforms are not ideal or even very well thought out from the customer perspective. This takes us right back to the knowledge gap written about above.
3. Long waits
This can happen in a doctor’s office or on hold with your internet provider or anywhere in between. It can be experienced as you showing up on time for your doctor’s appointment but then being told that they are running at least one hour behind schedule. Or you call a service number because your internet connection is faulty and you are just told that you have called at a “busy time” and that your call will be answered in the order they have arrived. With no indication of how long the wait will be! Both incidents are important, so you must wait.
4. Repeating yourself
Applying for jobs is a minefield of repeating yourself. You see a job on LinkedIn where you have entered all your current CV information. Then the job link sends you back to their website, where you can, sometimes, add your LinkedIn information with the click of a button but it may or may not be correctly configured in their form. So, this information would need to be edited. Next, they ask you to fill in all your relevant information that is already on your LinkedIn and on your pdf CV. Then they will ask you to upload your CV as a file. At this point, you have given them the information up to 3 times before you have even finished applying for the job! Or in medical contexts, having to explain your symptoms first to a gatekeeper nurse, then to a regular doctor, then, possibly, to a specialist. If your problem is not diagnosed at that point, this situation can cycle through repeatedly.
5. The referral chain
The previous example leads us to this common friction point: the referral chain. This comes with different statements such as “Sorry, you need to talk to ‘X’ department about this issue” or “This sounds more like a billing problem, we only deal with sales here.” This situation can seem ok at first, it is understandable that on your first try you might not be speaking to the right person, but after two or more referrals, the frustration builds. I once had to call the Canadian Revenue Agency (Tax Office) in my home country, and I was on the phone for over an hour and had spoken to four separate units who could not help me with my taxation issue. True story! In the end, I can say, it was just left, never resolved. This has left me a little worried about how to fix this, but the confusion has left me unsure of where to turn.
Why services are hard to use
As stated in the opening of this article, services are designed and implemented by people who are experts in their area. Not only that, but they are designed so that they are logical to the organisational structure, not for the people who will use them. This logic can also be lost to history within an organisation. It may be that this specific unit used to be responsible for a certain topic but since the organisational knowledge resides in one group of employees, the service remains there when other parts are moved to new structures. Organisational silos, where information stays in one part of the organisation, legacy systems, and possible internal political compromises all leave ‘experiential’ scars, even if they are not visible to everyone.
Rather than friction being a deliberate design mechanism — although it absolutely can be — most friction users experience on a day-to-day basis is more likely to be an accumulation of the reasons just stated above: silos, systems, and compromises. Services can be built and rebuilt without much forethought on whether they were well or purposefully created previously. The friction you may feel as a service user is rarely from user failure, it is much more likely to be a design problem.
Designing for the person, not the process
Service design, the purposeful design of everyday and extraordinary services sees the service through the user and the organisational lens. The user perspective is demonstrated through customer journeys which map an end-to-end experience and how something is experienced by the user. This means that it must make sense not only to the organisation that creates it, but it also must be understood and usable by the person who needs to use it.
Creating services this way shifts the focus from the knowledge expert to include the point of view of the person who must journey through the service once it is in place. To achieve this, we need to design services for people who don’t already know how they work? Depending on the service being designed, people may only experience them once or twice in their lives — like being an executor of a will — or it may be something that they need to do repeatedly like update their driver’s license or passport but with some years in between the process. In addition, it is important to understand that each of these processes can change with new laws or internal organisational changes every few years which makes having a user perspective very important.
For service design to work, time must be taken to listen to the users and what they need, what they want, and what goals they are trying to achieve. Then this needs to be integrated into what and how the organisation can do things. There are many variables to consider, and time needs to be taken to consider them.
What improves when friction disappears
There are many improvements for users, staff members, and the organisation itself if it can remove friction from its services. For the users themselves, it will save them time, they will build a trust with that organisation, and in some cases, it helps to even preserve some dignity and ensures they feel seen. This is especially important in a place where they are trying to inform different services where a close person has passed away or is no longer able to take care of their own affairs. The very real struggle can be seen in an American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) short documentary about a camp for widows where they discuss how dealing with services — utility services, mobile phone services, internet and TV services — can be a breaking point for someone who has been recently widowed (Green & Moot-Levin 2025).
As for organisations, eliminating friction will improve efficiency, efficacy, and reputation. For staff members, being able to remove friction means that they will receive fewer complaints and frustration from users, which helps them to focus on their other work. It also means that there can be less repetition in dealing with the same problems repeatedly, which saves time and builds trust between both the employee and the organisation and between the users and the organisation. When users know that they are valuable and being kept in the loop about things that affect their service, they are more likely to recommend the service to others.
Next time you feel frustrated by a service, you can ask yourself: is it me, or a design problem? Most likely, it’s the latter. The good news is that friction is fixable. Service design gives organisations the tools and the perspective to see what their experts can no longer see — this is where the real transformation begins.
References
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2006, December). The curse of knowledge. Harvard Business Review.
Green, L. & Moot-Levin, A. 2025. Camp Widow. Released 23 June 2025. Accessed 10 April 2026. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/camp-widow/
The Decision Lab. n.d. Curse of Knowledge. Accessed 8 April 2026.
Author
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Pamela Spokes
Specialist, Metropolia UASPamela Spokes BA, MA, MBA, AmO. Educator in Service Design and Entrepreneurship with the Turbiini Pre-Incubator Programme in English.
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