The hierarchy of B2B user friction

Eliminating user friction in your product is likely a top priority if you want to improve your onboarding experience. But, out of the hundreds of B2B onboarding teams I've worked with, most only solve one of three types of user friction. Especially for B2B companies, higher-level forms of friction have a bigger impact on the org-wide adoption of your product.

What do I mean?

Today, we’ll discuss the 3 levels of B2B onboarding friction and how you can overcome them.

The hierarchy of B2B onboarding friction

User friction is anything that prevents users from accomplishing their desired outcome in your product. In B2B, that could be:

• Setting up their account.
• Uploading their data into your product.
• Installing your code snippet into their production.
• Inviting a colleague to collaborate and get feedback.
• Advocating your product to their managers to get budget approval.

As we saw in my previous post, B2B onboarding is exponentially more complex than B2C due to multiple stakeholders, team dynamics, and organizational processes.

That’s why I categorize user friction for B2B products into 3 levels:

• Functional friction: These barriers prevent users from completing tasks within the product interface. Examples include confusing navigation, slow load times, and unclear error messages.

• Social friction: These barriers involve people, processes, and politics within your organization and the customer’s organization. Internally, these are misaligned teams and metrics around onboarding. Externally, these are customers struggling with stakeholder alignment, team adoption, and organizational change management.

• Emotional friction: These barriers stem from psychological and emotional responses to the product and change process. These include fear of failure, resistance to new workflows, anxiety about job security, and frustration with learning curves.

1. Functional friction

When people talk about friction in the onboarding experience, they typically focus on functional friction first. Functional friction covers all aspects of the UI that may hinder your users from accomplishing their goals. This includes overwhelming signup and setup processes, inconsistent UX across all experiences, and confusing navigation patterns.

For example, Salesforce is notorious for its complex interface that can overwhelm new users. With multiple tabs, menus, and customization options, sales teams often struggle to complete basic tasks like creating contacts or logging activities.

Functional friction in B2B onboarding can manifest in technical implementation challenges, such as complex API integrations, compatibility issues with existing systems, or data migration processes.

2. Social friction

Social friction is barriers involving people, processes, and politics within the customer’s organization. It often appears when stakeholders have competing priorities or team members resist new workflows. Getting buy-in across departments becomes challenging, especially when the product requires significant process changes.

For Salesforce, social friction often manifests when sales teams resist adopting new processes, even though management has mandated the platform's use. Individual salespeople may continue using their own spreadsheets or legacy systems, creating data silos and reducing the platform's effectiveness.

Social friction also manifests within the onboarding team as misaligned goals, unclear responsibilities, and communication gaps between customer success, marketing, sales, and product teams. Without proper coordination, these teams can create a disjointed experience that confuses and frustrates users. (I talk more about this topic in ​the latest Onboarding Therapy podcast episode with the Arrows team​.)

3. Emotional friction

Emotional friction is the psychological barrier users face when adopting new products. It includes fear of making the wrong buying decision, anxiety about learning new systems, and concerns about job security.

These emotional barriers often lurk beneath the surface, making them harder to identify and address through traditional user research methods. Users may not explicitly express their emotional concerns, instead masking them with more rational-sounding objections about features or pricing.

For Salesforce, emotional friction appears immediately as new users upload their customer data into the platform. There’s an emotional hurdle around trusting a new system with their valuable customer relationships.

Mapping each of the three types of friction to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, emotional friction maps to psychological needs like security and esteem, which are often overlooked in product design. Social friction aligns with belongingness needs, while functional friction corresponds to basic physiological and safety needs. Understanding these relationships helps prioritize which friction points to address first.

Overcoming B2B friction in your product

While functional friction can be solved through better UI/UX design and documentation, social and emotional friction requires educational content and high-touch human intervention. This might include dedicated customer success managers, peer support networks, and executive sponsorship programs. The key is recognizing that different types of friction require different solutions and resources to overcome.

As discussed in ​the previous post​, that’s where the three pillars of successful B2B onboarding can help: in-product guides, educational content, and human interaction. Together, they can help overcome any type of B2B user friction:

The rest of ​the book will explore specific strategies and tactics for addressing each friction type. We'll examine how successful B2B companies combine product features, customer success programs, and organizational change management to create seamless onboarding experiences.

Companies can significantly improve user adoption rates and reduce their customers' time to value by understanding and systematically addressing functional, social, and emotional barriers.