Matthias SpeicherIn short
Most products are bought for the exception and judged in everyday use. You buy a car for the big trip, then drive it to work. And everyday use doesn’t judge it against what the purchase promised. It judges it on the things almost nobody thinks about when buying. The spectacular breakdown isn’t what forms the verdict. The repetition of small friction is. The exception can add to the account or draw from it, but only when it actually happens, and it rarely does. Everyday use does both too, and it happens every single day. Left unchecked, it racks up small withdrawals daily. This first part explains why. The second shows what to do about it.
There’s a pattern running through almost every buying decision, and hardly any manufacturer builds around it. They don’t build for it, and they don’t advertise for it either. There’s a reason for that.
People buy for the exception. They judge in everyday use.
A car gets bought with the image of the big trip in mind. The family in summer, a full boot, mountains on the horizon. That happens two or three times a year. The other 360 days it’s the commute, the shopping run, the kids to practice. The brochure sells the range for the road trip. The car gets experienced by how it feels at seven in the morning when you’re in a hurry.
This isn’t just true for cars. The drill gets bought for the big project and used to hang a picture frame. The camera for the trip, used for a snapshot at the playground. The software for the use case from the demo, used for the routine task you do forty times a day.
Why manufacturers optimise for the moment of purchase anyway
You might call that an oversight. It isn’t. Manufacturers optimise for the showroom moment because that’s where the decision happens, and the decision runs along the exception. There’s a psychological reason for it.
People don’t decide based on what they do most often, but on what they fear or long for most. A single extreme case, the long trip, the emergency, the edge situation, weighs more in the imagination than a hundred grey everyday drives. Everyday use isn’t top of mind because it’s unremarkable. The exception is, because it comes with a story. So at the point of purchase, the product itself isn’t at the centre. What’s at the centre is the picture of what it makes possible. You buy the version of your life where you take the road trip and drive up the mountain. Nobody chooses a car because the indicator stalk feels right. You choose the image of freedom, and later you get annoyed by the indicator stalk. On top of that sits a quiet assumption: what works in the exception will surely be fine in daily use. It rarely is, because the exception and the everyday are different jobs to be done. A product that handles the big trip can still stumble on the commute every single day.
That’s why manufacturers optimise for the exception and advertise with it. It’s rational as long as you only look at the purchase. It becomes a mistake the moment you look at ownership, meaning everything that comes after the purchase.
What everyday use actually measures
Here’s the real error many product teams fall for. Everyday use doesn’t measure the product against what the purchase promised. It measures it against the things almost nobody asks about when buying.
At purchase you ask about range, power, boot space, trim. In daily use what matters is whether the driving profile resets every morning, whether the phone connects reliably, whether charging starts on the first try. Hardly anyone asks about those things when buying, because you can’t picture them until you’ve lived with them. And those are exactly what forms the verdict later.
That holds even for the person who ultimately decides a product’s success in the market. I call them the everyday explorer. At the point of purchase they’re a daring adventurer too. They want the exception to work, the big trip, the full load, the edge case. The product has to manage that, or it won’t make the shortlist. But at their core, like almost everyone, they’re an everyday explorer. That “only” isn’t a put-down. It’s simply the reality of most lives. You buy the adventure and live the everyday.
Building for the exception means building against the pub argument
Electric mobility is demonstrating this right now. Anyone offering 800 or 900 kilometres of range today, and that’s more than plenty of combustion cars manage, is optimising for the two percent who actually need that range. For the holiday drive without a charging stop, for the rare long-haul day.
And they’re optimising against the pub argument, which moves to the next objection as soon as the first one is met. For years the argument was range anxiety. Barely is it solved technically, and it becomes charging anxiety. Are there enough chargers? Is one always free? Is it fast enough? The target keeps moving, because it was never about the number. It was about the worry behind it. Range you can deliver. Peace of mind you can’t, not by printing a bigger number on the spec sheet.
For the big exception there are solutions. For the small one there aren’t
There’s a reason the big breakdown shapes the verdict less than the small, repeated friction. For the big exception, an entire safety net exists. If the car breaks down, roadside assistance comes. If it’s broken, there’s the garage, the tow truck, the replacement car, customer service. The spectacular failure is expensive and rare, but it’s caught. It gets resolved, and in resolving it the manufacturer even makes a deposit.
For the small friction, none of that exists. No roadside crew turns out because the driving profile resets every morning. No garage fixes that the phone connection drops every third time. And not everything can be solved by a software update, assuming one ever comes. The small friction has no safety net. It lands straight on the user, every day, and stays there.
The trust account: deposits and withdrawals
You can picture it like an account every user keeps in their head. It’s run on experiences and emotions. Products pay into it, and they draw from it.
The deposits often come through the five percent you bought the product for. The exception you had in mind at purchase. The account gets loaded up front, like a prepaid balance. In daily use it only refills slowly, through the absence of friction.
Withdrawals happen in two very different ways. The escalation is the visible fault. Something doesn’t work, there’s an alert, a ticket, a response. If it gets fixed, the balance usually evens out again. The erosion is the invisible withdrawal. A process works, but not effortlessly. On its own it goes unnoticed. In sum it drains the account until all that’s left is a feeling: this product is a pain.
And now the decisive asymmetry. The exception can only pay in when it occurs, and it rarely does. The everyday happens daily, many times over, and it’s often a withdrawal. How long does 800 kilometres of range offset the irritation of resetting the assistants every morning, before the mood tips? The big number sits on paper. The small withdrawal happens in reality, every day. At some point one drop is enough, because the bucket has long been full.
The mechanics of this erosion, why it’s cumulative rather than linear, I’ve worked out in detail in the Trust-Friction series. For this context the core is enough: a product doesn’t win or lose on the big event. It wins or loses on the sum of the small ones.
One point belongs on the deposit side, because it’s often overlooked. It isn’t only the absence of friction that fills the account. The feeling of owning a current, well-tended product is a deposit too. A user can objectively have everything they need and still be dissatisfied, because the product feels dated while others move on. Conversely, every noticeable improvement to the existing product pays in, even to a feature you rarely use. That’s an emotional and social job, not a functional one. People like to say their product is fresh and looked after. So the question isn’t only whether a product works, but whether it feels alive. Caution still applies, because not every new feature pays in. Add something past the actual need and you create fresh friction instead of appreciation. This gets especially tricky when existing, daily frictions go unfixed while new features are stacked on top. That’s almost always what happens. The old friction keeps drawing down the account, and the new feature pays in little, because it doesn’t touch the actual annoyance.
The Customer Journey from Hell as a tool
How do you make the small friction visible before the customer leaves? One tool I use for this is the Customer Journey from Hell.
The idea is simple. You lay out one single, continuous use, a drive, a charging session, a workday with the software, and deliberately pack into that one journey everything that could go wrong. Not because it normally happens all at once, but to make every possible friction point visible in one place. You fill each step with the question: what could stop, confuse or annoy the user here? From searching to finding, approaching, paying, using, all the way to leaving.
You feed the tool with primary data, qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative means what users actually experience, drawn from feedback across every channel, support, social media, direct conversations. Quantitative here means above all the frequency with which a friction is experienced, not the number of people who report it. Because most people report nothing. They don’t contact support and don’t post about it, they just switch. What you notice yourself belongs in there too, but it has to be validated. This is where the trap of the cave allegory lurks. Rely only on your own projection and you mistake shadows for the thing itself, and you’re usually wrong.
What this exaggerated journey shows isn’t the normal case. It’s the map of the breaking points. And it says something about the ratio of exception to everyday.
Because when you go through the collected friction points, one thing stands out. The exception rarely appears. The two-metre flat-pack wardrobe that won’t fit in the boot shows up once. The trailer, the edge situation, the extreme case, all rare. What piles up is the everyday. The phone that won’t connect. The setting that’s been reset. The extra step at payment. The Journey from Hell makes plain at a glance what the statistics obscure: most breaking points sit in the ordinary, not the extraordinary. Exactly where nobody looks, because it seems too everyday to matter. And that’s exactly where the driver stands who slams the charging cable to the ground in fury, drives off, and never comes back. No ticket, no complaint, just an aborted session in the statistics and one customer fewer.
The real goal
In the end there’s a simple measure of when a product is truly good.
A product is good when I stop thinking about how to use it and what problems it might cause me. When I’m no longer operating the tool, but simply experiencing myself reaching my goal, because the product meets my needs without getting in the way.
People buy for the exception. They stay for the everyday. Or they leave because of it. The only question is whether a manufacturer finds that friction before the customer experiences it, before a competitor fixes it in their own product, or before they wisely never build it in at all. That’s what the second part is about.