Zero-friction expectations
The smoothest experience anyone has anywhere quietly becomes the minimum they expect everywhere — resetting what counts as reasonable to ask of a consumer, a citizen or an employee.
Change driver · Updated July 2026
The shift ahead
From acceptable friction to perceived failure
Expectations don’t respect industry boundaries. They travel with the person.
Someone who summons a car, splits a bill and approves a mortgage from a phone does not reset their standards when they encounter a paper form, a hold queue or a password reset. Every effortless interaction anywhere raises the bar for every interaction everywhere, and organizations increasingly compete not with their peers but with the best experience their audience had that morning.
The shift is not that people want convenience; they always did. It is that friction is now interpreted as failure — evidence of an organization that doesn’t value the person’s time — even when the friction is deliberate, protective or legally required.
Why it matters
Friction used to be a cost of doing business. Now it’s a reason people take their business elsewhere.
The economics are measurable: seconds of delay and extra steps convert directly into abandonment, and the losses land silently — nobody files a complaint about the form they never finished.
The harder judgment is what friction to keep. Some of it protects people — verification, consent, deliberation — and organizations that flatten everything indiscriminately will discover which speed bumps were load-bearing.
Possible futures this could enable
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01
Checkout becomes the battleground
The final step of any transaction gets engineered like a race course, because that’s where intent goes to die.
Early signalBaymard Institute’s meta-analysis of 50 studies puts average cart abandonment at 70%, with 22% of US shoppers abandoning purchases specifically over a checkout that felt too long or complicated — part of an estimated $260 billion in orders recoverable through better checkout design alone.
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02
Passwords die of impatience
Authentication, the internet’s oldest speed bump, gets replaced not because it’s insecure but because it’s slow.
Early signalThe FIDO Alliance’s Passkey Index, drawing on data from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, PayPal and others, clocks average passkey sign-in at 13.6 seconds versus 27.5 for passwords, with a 30% lift in conversion — momentum behind the 5 billion passkeys now in active use.
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03
Friction becomes a legal liability
Regulators are starting to treat deliberate stickiness — subscription traps, cancellation mazes, lock-in — as consumer harm to be punished.
Early signalThe FTC’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon in September 2025 — a record $1 billion civil penalty plus $1.5 billion refunded to roughly 35 million consumers — punished Prime enrollment tricks and a cancellation flow that Amazon’s own employees compared to reading Homer’s Iliad.
Right now, the expectations have already arrived.
Most organizations are running experiences designed for a more patient era, patching the worst gaps with apps and portals while the underlying processes still assume people will wait, repeat themselves and tolerate ambiguity. The audience stopped assuming that years ago.
The line that will matter is the line between removing friction and understanding it: leaders who map where effort genuinely protects people, and eliminate everything else with conviction.
Watch what people experience as unacceptable delay.
The driver strengthens as thresholds fall: wait times that were normal becoming reasons to leave, single extra steps producing measurable abandonment, and “how long did that take” becoming a governing metric in industries that never used to measure it.
The question is not how fast an organization can get. It is whether it knows which of its remaining frictions are features.
This is one force among many.
We track the ones that will reshape your field, and what to do about them.