How Zipf’s Law of Least Effort Drives Product Adoption

Humans are lazy. we are always looking to get the biggest outcome for the least possible effort. We are wired to choose the path of least resistance. And we do so on a daily basis without even thinking about it. It’s automatic. And we’re not alone. As far as we know, everything in nature does this; from plants to clouds to lighting and the stars in the sky. Conserving energy is born into all living beings. In nature, you never know how long it will be before you find your next meal. Your life depends on conserving energy.

This means that we will always choose the more easy, effortless option over the more difficult one when we do something. Anything really. Even speaking. And that is what George Kingsley Zipf observed: we humans have a tendency to decrease the amount of energy that they put into talking. Linguists call this, “the economy of effort”, which is when sounds change over time to save effort.

If we take the English language as an example, we can see here that it’s changed so much over time that we are still able to understand the English that was spoken in the time of Shakespeare, some 400 years ago, but Shakespeare would probably not have been able to understand the English that was spoken 400 years before his time. And that is because the people speaking that language are sloppy and simplify the language. words like ‘going to’ become ‘gonna’, ‘it is’ becomes “it’s” and ‘because’ becomes ‘cos’ and so on.

The evolution of the English language from the 5th century to the current day

The principle of least effort is extremely important to keep in mind when you design or improve user flows. User flows make up a website’s or app’s underlying structure. As a designer, you should know that goal-oriented users have one or more clear goals in mind that they want to achieve. In doing so, they are always on the lookout for shortcuts. Something simple that conserves energy, and I mean brain energy, and that prevents cognitive overload, which is when you drain your brain’s energy supply, wins the day.

And let’s get something out of the way while we are here: the 3-click rule. You may have heard about it at some time in your career. The 3-click rule and states that the maximum amount of clicks towards a goal should never be more than 3. Studies have shown, however, that fewer clicks do not correlate with higher user satisfaction. the number of clicks is not as important as the flow towards the user’s goal, provided you make the steps invisible and provide constant feedback on the user’s progress.

Image: Henrik Ishihara Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

If you work in the field of service design, product design, or User eXperience design, you have seen the above image many times before. It shows a path with an obstacle in the middle which is obstructing the flow of the cyclists. Clearly, the cyclists’ goal is whatever lies at the end of that path and they will get there in the most effortless way possible. So they simply go around the object that blocks their way.

The obstruction blocking their, way stops the cyclist’s flow, which causes friction. Just like a dam that blocks the flow of water in a river or a mountain blocking a gush of warm air reaching the other side, unless the reward is worth the effort, it will do anything to avoid that friction and go around it. People are no different.

Image: Henrik Ishihara Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ikea understands this well and offers its customers their own shortcuts in their stores. in fact, if you have ever been to one of their stores, you can see that it is built around the journey that people take. window shoppers or ‘browsers’ can simply start at the beginning of the journey and ‘stroll’ past all the displays and installations and gaze at the ingenuity of some of the solutions the designers came up with and dream about how they can fit that into their homes and then have something to eat in the restaurant.

But if you’re goal-oriented and know exactly what you want, then you can either check the map to see where you need to go directly or you can ask the friendly person at the entrance of the store and she will guide you there.

Just like the riverbed is the river’s underlying structure, this is IKEA’s underlying structure that everything flows through. It is what ensures that the customer’s journey through the store feels effortless, except for their labels of course.

Ikea knows that its key is to remove as much friction as possible if you want people to focus on the items in the store rather than focus on their journey through the store. they aim for a frictionless flow to help users achieve their goals.

So let’s recap:  What we have seen so far is that everything in nature strives to minimise effort. That friction due to obstacles —which I use in the broadest sense of the term— is inefficient and costs energy, and that something frictionless is easy and efficient and saves energy. We also saw that the underlying structure of ‘something’ determines the amount of friction that someone encounters. That is all you need to remember for now.

To further illustrate this point let’s look at some people from the past: Henry Ford provided a more frictionless assembly of his cars by introducing a moving assembly line in his factories. Sakichi Toyoda is famous for introducing lean manufacturing at Toyota which minimises waste which decreases friction, and Ikea provides an efficient process from beginning to end with a high-value addition for the customer in the shape of seamless journeys that offer shortcuts.

What Ikea does in its stores it also does on its website: it offers a frictionless experience. The underlying structure is akin to the experience in the store. It offers a clear overview of what is there, a very good search functionality, and a frictionless journey for both browsers and goal-oriented shoppers.

I take Ikea as an example for this story, but that’s only because it illustrates so well how to combine the law of least effort with a commercial experience.

HOW TO DO IT

There are several methods that you can use to remove friction from your flows. First of all, you need to identify them. Identifying friction points can be done by observing your visitors when they use the website. That way you can see what issues (=friction) they run into when they perform one or more tasks.

Two of the most important methods that I know of how to do this are:
1. Real-time. By being in the same room with a participant and just look over their shoulder to see what they do and what problems their run into.
2. Look at the data. I advise you to ask a web-analyst to help you with this.

For the first method when you choose to observe people in their real-life environment, you should start off by defining a few key-targets that zoom in on the issue that you are trying to uncover. Not too many, 6 or 7 should do the trick. These will help you find the friction points for the journeys that you want to understand and improve. Make sure you have either a prototype ready or use the live website and let the user just go through the journey until they achieved their goal. This is just one observation technique that is part of a much wider net called ‘field studies’. Its main purpose is to get under the skin of the people who visit your website. The information that we get from these studies is generally called soft data because it requires interpretation and is hard to turn into numbers and charts although that has just been made easy with the help of AI.

The second method is to look at the data. When a web-analyst gathers information about a user’s activity on the website she can see what the majority does or doesn’t do. She then turns this information into numbers and charts —the hard data— and offers insights and advice for improvement. It resembles the good ol’ heuristic walkthrough but based on numbers and not on knowledge.

It goes without saying that combining both methods offers the best results, which is why I encourage designers to partner-up with analysts. Especially one that understands that people are not rational even though numbers and charts say they are.
So if you can wait before you start making pages and interactions without having actual knowledge about your users on board. Knowledge of friction-points that people run into will help you design better solutions. It’s the key to making invisible flows (because that is what good flows are) is knowing where friction points are and how to get rid of them. Deal with the major ones first and then work your way down to the smaller ones.

Eliminating all friction from your flows makes for happier customers and happier customers are returning customers.