Completion Distance
Every extra step between intention and action is not an inconvenience. It is an opportunity for the intention to disappear.
Where the Budget Goes
Most of what an organization spends on marketing is spent trying to produce one thing: the moment someone decides they want what you are offering—a campaign lands. A message connects. The person moves toward you.
The moment is real, but it is not the one that determines whether anything takes place.
Once the intention has been formed, a journey is set in motion. This journey involves several steps: finding the link, getting to the correct page, logging into an account, locating a number, reading an instruction written for someone else, and then switching from the phone to the laptop to carry out something that could not have been done on the phone. None of these steps are substantial. They all require only a small amount of effort. And at each stage, a small toll is taken from the original intention — not because the person has lost the desire to carry it out, but because the path demanded more of them than they had available at that moment.
It isn't about a funnel problem; it's about a distance problem, and solving it means focusing on an area most organizations aren't.
Marketing is what generates intent, and experience design decides how much of that intent remains.
The Data Behind the Pattern
In 2026, Datos Insights conducted a survey for SBT of 2,000 American consumers about their experiences paying a bill after receiving a reminder. Two-thirds of respondents stated they expected to make the payment in 3 steps or fewer after receiving the reminder. Over one-third said they had postponed a payment because the process seemed too complicated, and in almost half of cases where payments were delayed, deadlines were missed.
The study is sponsored and has a directional character, but one point made by the head analyst of Datos Insights is worth highlighting completely on its own. David Albertazzi from Datos Insights stated that step count, login failures, and channel handoffs should be treated as conversion metrics — consumers who delay because the process is too complicated are not unwilling; they are blocked. The problem does not lie in the intent; it lies in the gap between the intent and the end.
The way in which organizations assign blame for their losses is affected by that reframe: a drop-off which appears to be due to disinterest is usually something that can be recovered from; it is simply a journey which required too much.
How Friction Actually Works
When BJ Fogg was at Stanford, he worked for many years on creating a precise model to explain why people do or do not act, and what he discovered was that for a behavior to take place, all three of the following conditions had to be present at the same time: adequate motivation, adequate ability, and a prompt. If any one of these three elements is removed, the behavior won't occur even if the other two are very strong.
Friction has to do with ability. A login wall doesn't lower someone's motivation; it merely reduces the individual's effective ability at the moment they try to log in. Similarly, switching devices doesn't mean someone is less interested; instead, it reduces their ability at that moment to use this phone in the waiting room, given the time before they are called in.
What is often overlooked is that ability is not a fixed characteristic of an individual; it varies from one moment to the next. A person who finishes a twelve-step enrolment on a desktop on a Tuesday morning will abandon a four-step version when using a phone on a Thursday afternoon. The path itself did not change; it was the moment that did. Companies that design their journeys with the Tuesday-morning version of their audience in mind are not actually designing for the majority of cases in which enrolment is completed.
Every necessary transition is more than merely an annoyance; it is another instance in which the intention that set the journey in motion loses its way.
What the Analytics Cannot See
The issue is structural: most organizations assess conversion at the endpoint by counting completions. They lack, however, a precise account of where the journey fails and why — as a result, the losses build up without ever becoming a specific problem.
The general response is to increase spending at the top: run more campaigns, achieve greater reach, and get more people started on the journey. This approach is not irrational, as it is the only option the organization can see. However, it also amounts to financing the same losses, but on a larger scale. The individual who had started and then stopped halfway was already within the organization's reach; the campaign was a success, but the journey wasn't.
Completion Distance is the audit that is missing: it doesn't consist of any single figure; instead, it involves a map of the necessary transitions from intent to completion—namely, how many there are, where they are concentrated, and at which of these people are most likely to exhaust their ability before reaching the end.
A map couldn't be created from overall results; it is necessary to observe people as they attempt the journey and regard drop-off as diagnostic information rather than statistical noise.
Which Steps Earn Their Place
To reduce the completion distance is not the same as getting rid of all the steps between intent and completion; some of these steps are essential—such as verification, which prevents mistakes, confirmation, which safeguards the person and consent, which is actually theirs to give—these remain. The issue is not about how short the journey can be. The issue is which steps in it, in fact, serve the person going through it.
At what stage in this journey does the individual most require us to have already completed the work for them?
Three categories of transition tend to appear in most audits:
The necessary transitions—those that serve the user—include preventing unrecoverable errors, ensuring that something has actually occurred, and maintaining a record of consent for future use. These should be retained. The issue then becomes how much ability these transitions require and whether that cost is unavoidable or simply unexamined.
Organizational transitions: Steps that exist because of the organization's structure — not because the person needs them. Re-entering information the system already has. Being handed between portals that belong to different departments. Calling a number to verify something that could have been pre-populated. These are costs the organization transfers to the person rather than absorbing internally. They should be absorbed.
Assumption transitions: Steps that exist because the journey was designed under assumptions about who is taking it. Desktop-first navigation built for a mobile audience. Terminology borrowed from internal systems that patients were never meant to read. Instructions written for someone who has done this before. These are the most expensive transitions of the three because they are largely invisible to the people who designed the journey — and because they tend to occur precisely when the people who most need to complete it have the least time to spare.
The First Diagnostic Question
For a community health organization, completion distance is not a matter of user experience; it is an access issue. An uninsured patient who begins the enrolment process and then stops is not lacking interest in care; rather, they are at some point along the journey that the organization has designed, and at that point the requirements exceeded what they were able to meet.
The family who discovered the sliding-scale clinic, read the page and clicked through — but then encountered a login requirement for which they did not have the necessary credentials — is not opting for an alternative. They are facing a kind of transition that no one on the design team has identified as a problem, since the analytics treat them as non-completers, which is the same as the case of someone who has never shown any interest at all.
Before the next campaign brief is prepared, one should ask oneself this question: at which stage in the existing journey are those people who most need to reach the end most likely to give up? You should answer that question first. The campaign can then wait.
The result of marketing is intent, and the result of design is completion. A company that puts its money only into creating intent is essentially funding a journey it has not actually completed.
Datos Insights / SBT. (2026, September 30). The Competition for Consumer Payments: How Payment Experience Influences Consumer Choice and Payment Priority. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-sbt-research-with-datos-insights-finds-two-thirds-of-consumers-expect-to-pay-a-bill-in-three-steps-or-fewer-302893467.html (sponsor-commissioned research; figures are directional)
Fogg, B. J. (2009). A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology. https://behaviormodel.org
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