Today I want to share something I've been writing about in my knowledge base for a while. Fair warning: I've tried to condense about 6,000 words into something readable, hopefully the only thing that got lost in the process is the waffle.

Today's focus:

Friction Markets are the moments of tension already inside your experience, the situational shifts and states nobody's designed for. Inside them sits invisible growth and an edge that's genuinely hard to copy. The organisations that win stop designing for personas and start designing for the situations and states people are actually in.

Last week Wix charged me £611 for a two-year renewal on a site I hadn't used in months. My domain had moved, there was no traffic, and an advisor agreed to refund it. Eight hours later, a policy team overruled him.

To recover some cost, I worked around the system and downgraded. They kept roughly £200 for a product I wasn't using. When I asked to delete my account, I was told it couldn't happen until 2028. After four rounds, they agreed as a "goodwill" exception.

Wix filed to identify my Situation and State and ultimate lost a growth opportuntity

I wasn't just a customer leaving I was in a situation transitioning away, my circumstances had changed and my needs had evolved from what they were offering.

I was in a state: frustrated, undervalued, wanting a clean exit. That situation and that state combination describe a unidentified and real market. Customers in transition who need help moving on, white-glove offboarding, graceful exit support, a service that turns a churn moment into a loyalty moment.

Instead, Wix lost a customer permanently, extracted £200 from someone they had already lost, and missed an entire hot spot in the process

That's Experience and revenue Leak and its finest all from a single moment they couldn't read.

Buried deep in the way most organisations operate is an assumption that has quietly become a belief…friction equals waste.

If friction is waste then meaning is waste, and if effort is failure then growth is failure.

Think about it, A relationship with no tension has no honesty, a trip with no uncertainty has no lasting story, and an education with no challenge has no real transformation.

Friction isn't the opposite of good experience It's one of the mechanisms that gives experience weight. The problem isn't friction itself it the fact most organisations can't tell the difference between the kind that destroys value and the kind that creates it, so they sheep dip the shit out of it and remove it all.

Bad friction is real, terrible returns processes, phone tree loops that make you want to throw your phone, a first day at work where nobody knew you were coming all these need to be removed without hesitation.

But there's another kind of friction, the kind that makes someone pause, lean in and pay attention. A moment of vulnerability where a service provider responds with something warm and off-script or a moment of cultural stretch where a traveller encounters something unfamiliar and feels their world expand. A moment of truth where an employee sees how an organisation handles pressure and decides whether to do whats right or be right.

These moments are uncomfortable and they can't be automated, and they are the moments people remember, not because they were pleasant, but because they were real.

Friction Markets are the decisive moments inside every experience where someone's actual state meets the organisation's response.

A state is the mindset, condition, or emotional reality someone is in right now. It’s where a confident traveller becomes jet-lagged and anxious, or when an engaged employee survives a restructure and quietly reassesses everything or in my case a hobbyist customer becomes a business owner and needs the product to evolve with them.

These are state shifts, when they happen friction emerges and that's when people are paying the most attention to you as a business and the experience you give them be it customer or employee. It’s here when they're deciding what you are, how you show up, whether you see them or just the category you mapped them to.

Friction Markets work in two dimensions.

The first: the charged moments that already exist inside every journey, billing disputes, service failures, first weeks, sign-ups. Most organisations try to eliminate or bury them in policy, and both approaches miss the point. Design these moments well, with clarity, care, and some basic humanity, and loyalty compounds. Design them badly and trust erodes faster than any marketing campaign can repair.

The second: the state shifts nobody designed for. The hobbyist who became a business owner, the confident person who became lost, the employee navigating parenthood. The customer whose entire situation changed but is still being served the same journey they were mapped to three years ago.

Most organisations miss these entirely because they designed for the static version of a person. If your journey only serves the version of someone who signed up, you are blind to the state they're actually in, and you are leaving value unclaimed every single day.

Opportunity Market are the unidentified situations that reveal themselves through friction and contexts where people have recurring needs that no one is serving because no one noticed the situation existed.

A situation is what someone is actually experiencing. Transitioning away, learning something new, recovering from failure, navigating competing demands, managing a life change alongside work.

Situations repeat, millions of people transition away from products every year, millions return to work after time off and millions navigate unexpected changes daily in their experience as a customer or employee

The situation creates a state, someone in transition feels frustrated, undervalued, or relieved. Someone returning to work feels behind, overwhelmed, or refreshed. Someone navigating a major life change feels divided, stressed, or quietly resilient.

So why does all this matter?

Well organisations that pay attention to friction discover the situations hiding inside it. They ask what situation is this person actually in, what state are they experiencing, and whether there's a whole market of people in this same situation that nobody is designing for if so, that right there is untapped growth and revenue opportunities.

The tactics with designing greater experiences isnt to eliminate friction, its to read what it's pointing to, and what it points to is a market nobody else has found or catering to yet.

In CX, the charged moments are easy to find sign-up anxiety, onboarding confusion, service failure, the moment someone's situation outgrows the product they signed up for. The organisations that design these moments with humanity and emotional care build trust that competition can't copy. When they pay attention to what the friction is pointing to, they find markets they weren't looking for.

In Employee Experience, most people functions don't talk about Friction Markets. They talk about engagement, retention, culture. But the moments that determine all three are identity flashpoints, the messy first week, the first real conflict, the first time an employee sees how the organisation handles pressure and decides whether this place is real or performative. Design these moments with intent and you earn commitment that lasts years. Miss them and you create a quiet cynicism that spreads through a function without ever appearing on a dashboard.

In tourism, the meaningful friction is often what people remember long after the itinerary fades. The alley you almost didn't walk down or the ritual that made you uncomfortable before it made you feel part of something. Destinations that over-fix for convenience sterilise this, they replace the arrival moment with an airport express and the cultural encounter with something curated that asks nothing of the visitor. What they lose is the friction that made the place matter.

Three different contexts, the same pattern.

The Wix advisor who agreed to the refund had it right. He read the situation, saw the state, and responded like a human. The policy team saw a process and overruled him. They didn't just lose a customer, because they were already losing the customer. What they lost was the question the friction was asking: who else is in this situation, and what would it take to serve them well?

That question is where every unidentified market begins. Most organisations never ask it.

The organisations that win aren't the ones who removed the most friction. They're the ones who learned to read it.