Reading Your Own Site as a Stranger

The problem with looking

You know what your business does, what each page is for, and what every heading means, so you cannot read your own site.

Your eye skips the navigation because you know where things are. You read a vague sentence and fill in the meaning it does not contain. You see a photograph and remember the job rather than seeing an image.

Which is why looking at your own site carefully usually finds nothing, and a stranger finds three problems in a minute.

The techniques below are all attempts to remove some of what you know, and none is comfortable.

The five-second question

The most useful test available and the cheapest.

Show somebody who does not know your business your homepage for five seconds, then take it away and ask what the business does and who it is for.

Five seconds is roughly what a visitor gives you, so the answer is a reasonable approximation of the impression you make.

The common outcome is an answer that is vaguely right and specifically wrong: they know the industry and not the service, or the service and not the customer.

Do it with three or four people, because one person's confusion is noise and three people's is a finding.

The four questions a stranger has

• What do you actually do, specifically.
• Do you do it for somebody like me.
• Do you cover where I am.
• Roughly what does it cost.

Walk your own homepage and see how quickly each is answered. On most small business sites the first takes too long and the last is not answered at all, which is a large part of why enquiries arrive unqualified.

Use a phone you do not normally use

A small trick that removes more familiarity than it sounds like.

Your own phone has your site cached, is signed into things, has your history, and shows you the version you have always seen.

Borrow one, or use a private window, on mobile data rather than your own wireless, away from your premises.

That combination is what a genuine first visitor experiences: no cache, an unfamiliar layout at a different size, and a real connection speed.

A surprising number of businesses discover a slow first load, a banner covering the content, or a menu that behaves differently from the one they know.

Ask somebody outside the business

The most honest source and the most awkward to arrange.

Not a colleague, who knows too much, and not a customer, who already chose you and will be polite.

Somebody unconnected: a friend in a different trade, a relative, or a business acquaintance who owes you a favour.

Give them one instruction: find out whether we could do a particular job for you, and tell me what you were unsure about.

Then stay silent while they do it, which is the difficult part, and write down every hesitation rather than explaining it away.

Ten minutes of that finds more than an afternoon of your own review.

A worked example

A firm asked four people the five-second question about their homepage.

Three said some version of building work and one said architecture, which was not what they did at all.

None mentioned the specific service that accounted for most of their revenue, which was described in the third paragraph.

They also had somebody attempt to find out whether the firm covered a particular town, which took her four clicks and ended on a contact page that did not say.

They rewrote the first screen to name the service and the area, and added coverage to the header.

Repeating the five-second test three months later produced accurate answers from all four people, and enquiries from the right area rose over the following quarter.

Read it aloud

A technique borrowed from writing that works unusually well on web copy.

Read your main pages out loud, at normal speed, without stopping to fix anything.

Sentences that cannot be said comfortably are sentences nobody can read comfortably, and they are almost always the ones written to sound professional.

You will hear the padding: the paragraph about your commitment to quality, the sentence that says nothing, the phrase you would never use to a customer's face.

Anything you find yourself skipping while reading aloud can be deleted, and the page will be better.

Check what happens after the click

The part of the walkthrough people stop before reaching.

Complete your own contact form, from that borrowed phone, as though you were a customer with a real question.

Then look at what arrives, how long it takes anybody to respond, and what the customer receives in return.

A confirmation that does not arrive, an autoresponder written in 2018, or a reply two days later are all part of what a stranger experiences and none of it is visible from reading pages.

Do the same with the phone number, calling from outside, and notice how it is answered.

The counter-case

Fresh-eyes reviews can produce over-correction.

A single confused person is not a mandate to rewrite a page that has been producing enquiries for two years, and design opinions from people outside your market are frequently wrong about what your customers want.

There is also a difference between confusion and unfamiliarity: somebody outside your trade will not understand terms your actual customers use daily, and simplifying those can make the page worse for the people who matter.

Weight what they could not find over what they did not like, since the first is a failure and the second is a preference.

Fix the things three people all stumbled over, and leave the rest.

The walkthrough

1. Ask four people the five-second question.
2. Check the four questions are answered quickly.
3. Use a borrowed phone on mobile data, away from work.
4. Watch somebody attempt a real task, silently.
5. Read the main pages aloud.
6. Complete your own form and see what arrives.
7. Fix what three people stumbled over.

Step four is the most uncomfortable and the most productive, and the discipline is entirely in not explaining anything while it happens.

Assessing a site you did not build is covered in auditing a site you inherited.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.