Customer research · Product friction · Workflow design
How do you find product friction that never becomes a support ticket?
Observe how customers complete real work, including the extra steps and tools they use. Ask for feedback at meaningful moments and check whether an improvement removes the underlying effort.
Observe customers who have learned to cope
Support tickets describe problems people chose and managed to report. They leave open what happened during work that never reached support. Include customers with ordinary usage and no recent tickets when researching a workflow, alongside people who stopped or asked for help.
Ask participants to walk through a recent task in their usual setting, with their normal equipment and materials. Obtain permission for observation and recording, and avoid collecting information the research does not need. Let the activity unfold before suggesting a more efficient path.
Look for repeated checks, restarts, handoffs and moves to other tools. Ask what each step accomplishes and what would happen without it. The aim is to understand the reason for a workaround, including requirements the product team may not yet recognize.
Ask at the point where effort becomes visible
Use questions grounded in the activity: Which part required extra work? What did you have to check? What happened next? Invite the participant to describe the sequence before proposing a cause. Keep observed behavior, their explanation and the team’s interpretation distinguishable.
Offer feedback opportunities during the task, after completion and when someone leaves without finishing. Record where the feedback arose. A prompt shown only after a successful final step gives the team a limited view of the people who could not get there.
Separate questions about the product task from questions about a support interaction. Helpful support can coexist with a recurring product problem. When another person participates occasionally, include that role in the research; the main user’s familiarity may conceal a difficult handoff.
Check whether the extra work disappears
Describe each finding as a specific obstacle in a specific situation. Estimate how often it occurs, who encounters it and what time, uncertainty or error risk it adds. Use broader behavioral data to investigate reach, while keeping the limits of a small research sample clear.
Choose a change that addresses the reason for the workaround. Define what should become easier to observe: fewer repeated steps, less correction, a completed handoff or a usable result without extra preparation. Preserve necessary checks and controls when simplifying the path.
Return to the same kind of task after the change. Check the full sequence, including what happens outside the product and whether support is still required. Keep the issue open if customers merely found another way around it. Close it when the evidence supports the intended improvement in their work.