Eight in-depth interviews with customers and prospects surfaced a gap between what a homepage was designed to prove and what a buyer actually needed to see before moving forward.
The product team needed an in-depth understanding of what roadblocks and pain points current and prospective users hit when considering the product, what mental models buyers brought with them, and where the page could do more to earn engagement.
I ran 1:1 in-depth interviews with 8 participants over 60-minute sessions, split across 3 existing customers and 5 prospects, conducted remotely over three days. Mixing customers and prospects mattered. Customers could speak to whether the page matched the product they already knew. Prospects could speak to what they needed before they would trust it at all.
Participants said they believed the company was trustworthy, and that trust carried over when they evaluated the product itself. If the company said it could do something, participants were inclined to believe it at face value.
But that same trust raised the bar rather than lowering it. Participants held the page to a higher standard because of who was behind it.
"This is [the company], not some unknown company. I expect more out of them than other companies." One participant said it directly, and the sentiment ran through the rest of the interviews. Brand trust bought patience, not a free pass.
Nearly all participants wanted pricing visible on the front page. Without it, most said they would rank the product below competitors who showed pricing plainly. One participant navigated three levels deep to find pricing and could not explain why it was not on the page he started on.
Post session ratings on a 7 point scale, participant mean.
The page scored well overall, but the lowest mark landed on headings and copy, the exact area participants described as wordy and hard to scan for what applied to their role. The quantitative rating and the qualitative complaint pointed at the same problem from two directions.
Withholding it did not read as confidence. It read as a gap competitors were already filling.
Nearly all participants wanted to evaluate the product against alternatives without leaving the page.
Participants said locating information relevant to their specific role was difficult, and that a role-based search would signal the company valued their time.
Wordy paragraphs were seen as corporate language participants did not have time to decode.