There are countless steps where the product experience can break down. Have you ever been waiting at the corner for a ride-sharing pickup, and while the app swears the driver is right there, there is no car in sight? Or how about seamlessly ordering groceries in an app, then waiting well past the delivery window with no sign of your avocados? Ever called customer service by phone to learn they have no record of the two detailed chats you had with online agents about your issue? We’ve all been there.

As consumers who increasingly rely on technology to help us wrangle a vast range of goods and services, we’ve all experienced pain points when really good software doesn’t equate a really good experience. All too often, there’s a breakdown that occurs outside product screens, when a product or process hits the reality of the human experience or a user fails.

Take a peek at the diagram above, which charts the various user touch points that can occur with your brand in a product experience loop. Users interact with a product through many different channels and modes of communication, and bridging the gaps between them is essential to your product’s success. If you present users with a custom call to action in a social media ad, your customer service teams must be ready to respond. If you build an offer email that is redeemable at a brick-and-mortar retail location, the cashier will need tools to redeem it.

Encountering any gaps in the product-experience loop is frustrating to the user and these points of friction jeopardize your businesses. I call these gaps mode-shift friction. Risks include the potential for lost revenue or increasing vulnerability to competitors who offer frictionless experience.

What Is Mode-Shift Friction?

Mode-shift friction encompasses any of the pain points that users encounter when they move between modalities within the same brand or product experience. These mode shifts include going from physical to digital channels, switching communication methods, changing the context of product use, inconsistency of functionality across different devices, and more.

Product teams are tasked with creating seamless digital experiences, but they frequently lack an empathetic transition from one mode to the next. This is often because internal organizational structures and processes put teams in charge of isolated parts of the experience, siloing them from one another as they work. The result? Each team optimizes to serve their needs best, making decisions that can be at odds with other teams, ultimately causing breaks in the experience flow.

Users don’t know and don’t care that responsibility is divided between teams; they will express their frustration by abandoning a product for one that is friendlier to use.

For this reason, it’s essential to resolve mode-shift friction wherever possible. The success of a product, and a business, can depend on it.

The History of Experience Mapping

The work to develop a comprehensive picture of a user’s experience is nothing new, and in the last few decades, several tools and methodologies have emerged that have become staples for product and design teams. The concept of service design goes as far back as bank executive G. Lynn Shostack’s 1984 Harvard Business Review article on measuring and improving the processes and services the bank delivered.

In the late 1990s, Amtrak asked design firm IDEO to help with the armchair design for a new high-speed rail service it was planning. As part of their observations, IDEO’s team mapped the steps of the journey users took to consider and ultimately purchase a seat on the train. And the journey map was born. Then more recently (though still a decade ago) a new form of mapping emerged when the design consultancy nForms introduced experience maps as part of an approach to deepening the relationship Comcast had with video gamers.

All of these approaches tackle macro focuses — process improvement, detailing a user’s emotional state, understanding the journey to drive the action. But as teams drill in to focus on a particular part of the journey, rifts start to appear between the swimlanes and linear process blocks that are depicted in these process documents. For example, the team optimizing for the conversion funnel may not have connected with the team optimizing the onboarding flow. So instead of a smooth transition, the user may have to disrupt or leave a more natural flow to check their email for a confirmation code.

As the lines get drawn, shifts in mode (between task/goal, system, process) can get ignored, creating mode-shift friction, and smart product teams need to delve into those crevices between the experience to create truly human experiences.

5 Steps to Easing Mode-Shift Friction

Creating a seamless experience overnight is unrealistic, because rethinking how different teams operate and connecting disparate software systems is a complex and time-consuming undertaking. However, improvement is absolutely possible if you take an iterative approach. I advocate for chipping away at the problem bit by bit. Don’t overcomplicate the solution with a new behemoth data warehouse project or rolling out company-wide process changes. Instead, try these five purposeful steps to identifying, quantifying, and beginning to eliminate mode-shift friction. They’re easy enough to start working into your very next sprint.

1. Find your gaps.

To identify the gaps in your experience, start with an experience or journey map you already have. If you don’t already have one, keep it simple and make a rough sketch of the major user flows of your product experience. Review these key flows with your customer-facing teams and start circling areas where a mode shift occurs. Maybe it’s when a user switches from an app to an email or call, or goes from buying to using a product. Focus on the gaps you all agree on, but prioritize and optimize the ones that front-line customer-facing teams think are the biggest issues. Name a product and operating team steward for each circle to ensure you have someone accountable for closing that gap.