A bit of friction, if applied correctly, is not a terrible thing if an interaction's cost outweighs it's value. Getting the balance right is tricky but worth considering some alternatives to just "putting up with it".
After all, "sure, I'm selling at a loss but I'll make it up on volume!" is not sustainable for too long (unless you are a tech company... just kidding).
I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.
I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
By fixing that bug, conversions went down. We literally did an A/B test to prove that giving the user a stupid error increased revenue. We even played with the text of the error to maximize revenue.
We never figured out why, but my hypothesis is the user has to feel like that are making progress through the task they are trying to achieve. Getting a pointless error, and then getting past it, gives them a sense of achievement. They're then happier and more invested in your product when it comes to plugging in a credit card number...
Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the
CRT [Shane Frederick's Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half
of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out
gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font
induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story:
90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made
at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion
dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read
this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.
Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2
[slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more
likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System
1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make
most of our minute-to-minute judgments].[1]
It's absolutely awful from a customer experience standpoint. But, I believe I end up buying more from them because when it does work I feel like I need to buy everything I've been thinking about because I don't want to deal with that hassle again anytime soon.
If this is the same sort of thing that was happening on your site, this would only work if your product is not available elsewhere for a similar or better price. In the case of under armour, their products are available elsewhere, but not in the same variety and not with the same discounts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
Though I'd also be wary of the impact these bugs are having on your brand name, and reputation. You might have stumbled into a local maxima.
Was this typo intentional so readers don't just disengage and skim through your comment? ;)
That's interesting, though. I wonder why more accurate instructions resulted in more problems. I know you mentioned 'disengagement,' but wouldn't more detail and accuracy make it easier to do the exercise(s)? Or does it make the students just zone out and type the lines out without thinking?
(I know I certainly was guilty of that the first time I went through the Linux From Scratch book.)