Effort isn’t always bad. Sometimes it’s where value is added.
We’ve become conditioned to think less effort is always better. But in many categories, effort is part of the experience, it creates satisfaction and value rather than friction. We consider where effort is bad and where sometimes, it’s actually good for people and brands.
Ask most product or service teams what they're optimising for and, somewhere on the list, you'll find ‘reduce friction’ and making something ‘effortless’. It's become a default lens for when building many products and experiences: fewer clicks, fewer steps, fewer moments where the customer has to stop and think.
It's even been turned into a KPI. The Customer Effort Score asks a version of the same question about experiences and interactions, asking how easy was this activity to complete. The assumption is that less effort is always better.
But in our audience research, we regularly see something more nuanced that this. Effort isn't always something people want removed. Sometimes it's part of what makes an experience satisfying, enjoyable, meaningful or worth doing in the first place.
Most of the time, reducing unnecessary effort is absolutely the right thing to do. But somewhere along the way, ‘friction’ and ‘effort’ got treated as the same thing, and they're not. Friction is effort that gets in the way of what we want. Effort itself is just the time spent and process doing something. And plenty of the things we find most satisfying involve real effort, deliberately kept chosen or built in, rather than something to be avoided.
We think of this in terms of good effort vs. bad effort. Bad effort is effort that sits between us and the thing we're trying to achieve: re-entering information we've already provided, navigating a confusing checkout, waiting on hold, or comparing twenty near-identical insurance policies. It adds work without adding value. It’s never rewarding.
Good effort is different. It contributes to the value itself: choosing, learning, making, comparing, mastering, curating. Remove it and the experience might become easier and quicker, but also less satisfying. The mistake isn't that businesses try to remove effort. It's that they often fail to distinguish between the two. Sometimes effort adds value, rewarding those who put the time into an activity.
Take Vinyl as an example of good effort
Vinyl shouldn't really be growing. Streaming does everything a record does faster, cheaper and without the hassle of storage, sleeves or scratches. And yet vinyl revenue has grown for eighteen consecutive years, hitting £174.7 million in 2025 (its highest in over three decades).
The usual explanation is sound quality, nostalgia, or both. Neither explains it completely. Plenty of vinyl's biggest buyers are too young to be nostalgic for a format they never grew up with. What vinyl offers, that streaming quietly removed, is good effort. Choosing which record to play. Finding it. Taking it from its sleeve. Lowering the needle. Switching to the B side. Sitting with it rather than skipping after thirty seconds. None of that is necessary, it could be seen as friction that led us towards digital music and then streaming. But for many, this can be described as good effort.
There's a well-documented tendency to value things more once we've put effort into them: the IKEA effect. The shelf we build ourselves means more to us than the identical shelf somebody else assembled. Related to that is effort justification: if we've worked for something, we're more inclined to believe it was worthwhile.
Underneath both is something more fundamental. Choosing for ourselves, applying judgement and developing skill satisfy needs for autonomy and competence. Getting something right, and knowing we got it right, can be rewarding in itself. Streaming's algorithm optimises away exactly the part that vinyl brings back.
Bad effort should remain a focus
None of this makes Customer Effort Score or trying to remove effort wrong. If we're trying to pay a bill, fix a delivery problem or renew an insurance policy, effort is exactly what it looks like on the scorecard: a cost. Nobody wants a more character-building returns process.
In low-involvement or functional tasks, bad effort should absolutely be designed out. The brands that succeed are often those that are easiest to notice, understand and buy. Add unnecessary choice or process and we don't get greater satisfaction. We get frustration, annoyance and sometimes abandonment.
The important question, then, isn't whether effort is good or bad in general. It's what kind of effort we're asking people to make. Good effort tends to have three characteristics.
First, we care about what we're doing. Researching or searching for records, cars, bikes, fashion, beauty products or tech gadgets can often feel meaningful; comparing electricity tariffs or insurance premiums usually doesn't.
Second, the effort feels bounded and navigable. A curated shelf of records invites immersion and exploration, while an infinite catalogue can become exhausting.
Third, and most importantly, the effort contributes directly to the experience. It helps us feel knowledgeable, capable, creative or in control.
Bad effort tends to do the opposite. It feels arbitrary, open-ended or unrelated to the value we actually came for.
The same pattern turns up everywhere
Once you start looking for good effort, it appears in all sorts of categories.
Coffee. Grinding beans and making a pour-over takes far longer than pressing a button on a pod machine. We don't do it because it's the fastest route to caffeine. For enthusiasts, the ritual and small sense of mastery are part of the product.
Cooking. Meal-kit brands could theoretically send a finished meal. Instead, they send ingredients and instructions. The chopping and assembling create the feeling that we've actually made something, and removing all of that effort would remove part of the appeal.
Reading and watching. Autoplay removes the small moment of deciding what comes next. Against that, a physical book, a deliberately curated DVD collection or a service built around considered recommendations can feel like it's returning a degree of control that automation took away.
Fashion. Algorithmic recommendation feeds optimise for what we're statistically likely to click. Slower, more considered buying works differently: thinking about what we buy and why can itself be part of the enjoyment.
Cars and bikes. Comparing models, components and set-ups can be part of the enjoyment for enthusiasts. The research and tweaking create a sense of knowledge and ownership that an instant recommendation would remove.
Gadgets. Cameras, hi-fi and other tech often reward a bit of learning. Researching options, adjusting settings and gradually working out how to get the best from them can be part of the appeal.
In each case, technology offered to remove effort, and some people actively chose to keep it. That's the important distinction: the effort survives not because the experience failed to become more efficient, but because efficiency wasn't the only thing people valued.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are also the kinds of categories that thrive on YouTube, where reviews, comparisons, tutorials and deep-dives turn the process of choosing and learning (good effort) into content in its own right.
When the journey is part of the purchase
The same activity can feel very different depending on the category. Comparing specifications, reading reviews and weighing up options can be a chore when we're buying a washing machine, but part of the enjoyment when we're choosing something we care about. The difference isn't really the work; it's what the work means.
For considered or identity-linked purchases, deliberation can help us build knowledge, exercise judgement and feel ownership over the eventual choice. It’s often something we talk to other people about, it becomes socially valuable and rewarding. Yet product and service design often treats every purchase journey as something to shorten: fewer steps, faster comparison, instant recommendations.
For low-involvement categories, that's usually right. But when the choosing is part of the experience, making the journey quicker and less involved can also make it less rewarding. Sometimes helping people enjoy choosing or doing is more valuable than choosing or doing it for them.
What this means for brands, products and services
The outtake isn't ‘let’s make things harder and slower’. Brands should still focus on removing bad effort, but sometimes effort is good and it can be nurtured to be part of the experience that delivers value.
Frictionless isn't the same as valuable. Removing every decision and ramping up speed optimises for convenience, but it doesn't automatically optimise for satisfaction, attachment or enjoyment. The important thing is to know the context and what are the outcomes audiences are looking for.
Effort and friction need separating, including on the scorecard. A low Customer Effort Score after a billing query is obviously desirable. After choosing a car, guitar or sofa, it's less clear. If the effort was valuable, treating it as a failure risks optimising away part of the experience customers came for.
There's opportunity in curated, not just automated. The interesting middle ground sits between total manual control and total automation: recommendations that explain themselves, editorial or human curation, and tools that help us choose rather than simply choosing for us. The role of technology doesn't always have to be to make the decision effort disappear.
It's also a segmentation opportunity. The same category can contain a low-involvement customer who wants the algorithm and a high-involvement customer who wants the record shop. Traditional satisfaction measures often struggle to distinguish them because they focus on the outcome rather than how much someone values the process of choosing itself.
Sometimes the ‘Job to be Done’ includes good effort. We often focus on the functional, emotional or social outcome someone is hiring a product to deliver. But occasionally the job includes the process and effort involved: help me feel like somebody who chooses carefully, understands the category, shares experiences with others and has done the work. Miss that and you've missed part of the job.
None of this is an argument against reducing effort in general. It's an argument for being more precise about the kind of effort we're removing. Bad effort gets in the way of value; good effort helps create it. Experiences can be slower, take more effort and also be more valuable. In a world increasingly built around automatic, algorithmic, zero-effort delivery, that distinction matters.
