You know too much

You probably know your product better than anyone. You know what the model numbers mean. You might even know why the mid-range one is the clever buy, and what makes yours better than your competition.

Your visitor got here eleven seconds ago. And I’ll tell you what: most likely, they don’t know any of the above.

Closing that gap is the website’s main job. Empathetic design is the best name for the process behind it.

Inside baseball

Every business has its inside baseball. I’ve written about it before, and I keep coming back to it because of where the phrase comes from.

It comes from the sport. It’s the plays and signals a team keeps to itself so the other side can’t read them. It’s a code, and keeping people out is what it’s for.

That’s fine in the dugout. It’s fine in your office, in your Slack, in the Monday meeting. Call the product whatever you like in there.

Your website is the one place the code has to go. Out there, the outsider is the person holding the credit card.

Right thing, right moment

Plain words are only the start. The rest is how much you say, and when you say it. Give people everything up front and they read none of it. Give them too little at the point they hesitate and they leave.

Think about the best person who ever sold you something in a shop. They didn’t shout the price as you walked through the door. They didn’t start on the returns policy before you’d picked the thing up. They watched, they waited, and they said the useful thing at the second you needed it. You barely noticed, and you walked out with a bag.

A website has to do that with nobody in the room.

So say what it is when people land. Give them the reason it’s worth the money before the price shows up. Mention the offer while they’re still deciding. Reassure them when their thumb is over the button. And when a doubt arrives, and one always does, have the answer sitting right there.

Right words at the wrong moment still lose people. A guarantee three clicks from the button is a guarantee nobody reads.

$180 for boots

You sell boots at $180. The store down the street sells a pair for $60.

Show the price first and that’s the only comparison a customer can make. $180 loses.

Show them the leather, the stitching and the ten-year guarantee first, and the comparison changes. It’s one pair that lasts against a new $60 pair every year or two. Now $180 looks like the sensible buy.

Same boots. Same price. All that changed was what they knew when they saw it.

It takes more than a designer

Look at what that takes.

A strategy decision: who is this for, and what are they comparing us with? A structure decision: what do they see first? A line of copy: guaranteed for ten years. A content decision: which photo, which review, and where each one goes. Then the design, which has to make all of it feel like a brand worth $180.

That’s five jobs. The customer sees one page.

It’s why I don’t treat design as a coat of paint that goes on at the end. Strategy, UX, copy, content and design are all answering one question: what does this person need right now? Take one of them away and the page stops making its case.

Why you can’t see it on your own site

Because you can’t un-know your own business. Nobody can.

In 1990 a Stanford researcher, Elizabeth Newton, asked people to tap out well-known songs on a table while a listener guessed the tune. The tappers expected listeners to get it about half the time. Out of 120 songs, listeners named three. Chip and Dan Heath tell the story in their book Made to Stick.

Have a go. Tap out Happy Birthday on your desk. Obvious, isn’t it? It’s obvious because you can hear it. The person next to you hears knocking.

Your website is the tapping. You hear the whole song: what the product does, why it costs what it costs, why it beats the alternative. Your visitor hears knuckles on a table.

“We don’t sell online”

Doesn’t matter. Someone filling in an inquiry form has the same nerves as someone at a checkout. Have you done a job like mine? Who am I going to be dealing with? What happens when I press send? Leave those hanging and the form stays empty.

It sounds simple. It isn’t

Everything in this article sounds like common sense. Say the right thing at the right time. Who’d argue with that?

Doing it is another thing. You have to know which question a customer has at which second, about a product you didn’t build, for a person you’ve never met. That comes from watching it happen across hundreds of websites. I’ve been at it for 20 years and customers still surprise me.

You already hold a lot of the raw material: your analytics, the questions people ask on sales calls, your support inbox, your reviews. Reading it, and turning it into a page that sells, is the skill.

It shouldn’t be slow, though. Guessing is what costs. A site goes live on assumptions, nothing happens, and somebody pays to fix it.

Try it on your site

• Could a stranger say what you sell and who it’s for within five seconds of landing?

• Read your headings out loud. Would a customer use those words, or only your team?

• Find where your price first appears. What has the customer been told by then?

• Ask someone outside the business to buy or inquire while you watch. Note where they stop.

What to do next

Run those four on the page that gets the most traffic. They’ll show you where people get stuck.

What goes there instead depends on your product, your customer and your price. That’s the work we do. Book a call and we’ll tell you what your visitors aren’t getting, and what we’d change first.