Is product now
a part of the journey friction?
Five years ago I shipped a deeplink and the numbers went up. What it was telling us was that for consumers destination is greater than the journey.
Quite some time back, we once spent an afternoon in a meeting room evaluating whether people would remember the step by step instructions written in our email. And whether they would dropoff before completing the journey.
What if we could just land the customer directly on the ultimate screen and reduce the friction. Deeplinks, the answer emerged. We implemented it as an A-B test. Our journey starts went up by 26%. The hypothesis seemed correct - steps increase friction, reduce conversions.
A single deeplink >> than 5 steps and screens in the product journey.
But this is not to discuss deeplink. This is to discuss what happens to the product journeys in the world of AI.
Every next initiative of ours in the bank was to reduce friction - drop-offs, new product launches, and even the KYC updates were now a teleportation device to the final destination. Soon we realised we had actually developed a second navigation system running alongside the actual product journeys.
And the customer, for whom we did all this, responded - the customer didn't want to be taught the product, customer actually did not care about the product at all. They cared about the outcome. Whether their need was met or not. Convenient. Friction-free.
Deeplinks were not an enhancement in the journey.
They were the journey.
Last month my take got validated further. I received a UPI mandate for a stock I wanted to buy and I missed the push notification. I logged in and surprisingly I could not find where I needed to go to approve the mandate, it was confusing.
I had to initiate another notification to land directly on the UPI mandate page. This is now my expectation across all apps even apps like Supabase, PostHog etc. where I now search on the app to directly go to the destination.
Unfortunately, banking apps usually don't value search as much.
Google trained us to search years ago to keyword match our universal need. While Google searches were smart, the in-app searches were not Google controlled. Now, the intelligent search bar has moved inside the product, GPTs. Actually it is the only product navigation needed. Type in a box and you reach exactly where you want to be.
The digital customer facing product becomes a simpler interface, or even better, one integrated with the channels users are already comfortable with - WhatsApp, Telegram etc. Interfaces that do not need learning.
It isn't a surprise that startups are being built for agents, not for human user.
The deeplink that was identified as a solution in that meeting room five years ago was an early indication of what a user wants to do, not what you want them to do and whether it is reducing friction or improving conversions. It is my question in the margins:
Is product itself the friction?