Stewart Butterfield argues product teams waste time cutting clicks when users actually fail from not understanding what a product does. He uses Slack's signup flow as an example: faster paths don't work if people don't grasp the intent first.
Chapters
It became an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software kind of stops me and asks me to make a decision and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid. If people could get over the idea of reducing friction as a number one goal, or reducing the number of clicks or taps to do something, and instead focus on, how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software? People coming to slack.com, their intent is like, at the absolute minimum threshold, what was the challenge? It wasn't friction, right? Because it's not like they were aiming for something and they knew what they were aiming for, and they were just trying to get themselves to that point. What we had to worry about was creating comprehension in two senses. What is this thing and what am I supposed to do next? That creation of comprehension in the sense of explaining stuff, the design of the UI of the screen of the page, that becomes really critical. And I think very, very few people recognize that. They're like, I want to get people who come to my web page to the signup form as quickly as possible, but if they don't know what they're signing up for, then they're just going to back.
