Are You Making Your Customers Work Too Hard?
There’s a simple question every business should ask about its marketing:
How hard am I making this for my customer?
Not how hard it is for your team.
Not how much work went into creating the website.
Not how many hours you spent writing the copy.
How hard is it for the customer to understand what you do, work out whether you can help them, trust you and take the next step?
Because sometimes customers don’t leave because they aren’t interested.
They leave because getting to the answer they need feels like too much work.
Your customer doesn't want to solve a puzzle
Imagine someone lands on your website looking for a particular service.
They shouldn’t have to work out:
- What your business actually does
- Whether you work with people like them
- Where to find the information they need
- What your service includes
- How much it costs
- Whether you're trustworthy
- Or what they're supposed to do next
Yet this happens all the time.
Businesses often build websites and marketing from the inside out. They organise information according to how they understand the business rather than how a customer thinks about it.
The result can be a website that makes perfect sense to the people who work there — but feels confusing to everyone else.
Good customer experiences remove that mental effort.
Baymard Institute’s extensive usability research consistently identifies confusion and unnecessary friction as significant contributors to users abandoning online purchases. Its research also shows that too many choices can make it harder for people to navigate and make decisions.
Your customer shouldn’t need to work that hard.
Confusion is expensive
When people don’t immediately understand something, they don’t always stop and investigate.
They often leave.
That’s particularly important online, where your customer can move from your website to a competitor’s in seconds.
Think about the questions running through someone’s mind when they arrive at your website:
Am I in the right place?
Can they actually help me?
Is this relevant to me?
What do I do next?
If your website doesn’t answer those questions quickly, uncertainty starts to creep in.
And uncertainty makes people hesitate.
This is why clarity isn’t just a design preference. It’s part of conversion.
Your customer needs to understand the value of what you’re offering before they’re willing to invest more time, money or attention.
More choice doesn't always mean more value
It’s tempting to think that giving customers more options is helpful.
More services.
More products.
More packages.
More buttons.
More information.
More ways to get in touch.
But there is a point where choice stops being helpful and starts becoming overwhelming.
Baymard’s research into information architecture highlights that too many choices can overwhelm users and contribute to abandonment.
Think about the difference between:
“Here are 17 things we can do.”
and:
“Tell us what you’re trying to achieve, and we’ll help you find the right option.”
The second approach feels easier.
It gives the customer somewhere to start.
Your job isn’t necessarily to show customers everything you offer at once.
It’s to help them find what is relevant to them.
Your website should answer questions, not create them
A good website doesn’t just provide information.
It removes uncertainty.
For every important page, ask yourself:
What question brought someone here?
Then ask:
Have we answered it clearly?
For example, if someone is looking at a service page, they might want to know:
- What exactly is included?
- Is this suitable for my situation?
- What will I get from it?
- How does the process work?
- What does it cost?
- How long will it take?
- Can I trust this business?
- What happens if I want to go ahead?
You don’t necessarily need enormous amounts of copy to answer these questions.
You need the right information in the right place.
That distinction matters.
More content doesn’t automatically make a website more useful.
Sometimes it just gives your customer more to read before they find the answer they’re looking for.
Look at your calls to action
Another common source of friction is the next step.
You know what you want someone to do.
But does your customer?
“Learn More.”
“Explore.”
“Get Started.”
“Discover.”
These aren’t necessarily bad calls to action, but they can be vague.
Compare that with:
Book a Consultation
Request a Quote
Find Your Local Store
View Available Packages
Talk to Our Team
The customer should have a reasonable idea of what happens when they click.
A clear CTA reduces the amount of thinking required.
And when someone is already interested, you don’t want to introduce unnecessary hesitation at the exact moment they’re ready to act.
Make the buying journey feel obvious
A customer journey doesn’t need to be complicated.
In fact, the best ones often feel almost invisible.
Someone discovers your business.
They understand what you offer.
They see that it’s relevant to them.
They find evidence that they can trust you.
They understand what happens next.
And they have an obvious way to take that next step.
That’s it.
Of course, the reality behind that journey can involve a lot of strategy, content and design.
But the customer shouldn’t have to see all of that.
They should simply feel:
“This makes sense.”
“This is what I need.”
“I know what to do next.”
For ecommerce businesses especially, this becomes even more important at checkout. Baymard’s research currently puts average cart abandonment at around 70%, while also finding that a significant proportion of abandonment is connected to fixable usability problems such as complicated checkout processes, unexpected costs and forced account creation.
The lesson isn’t that every abandoned customer could have been saved.
It’s that unnecessary friction costs businesses real opportunities.
Try walking through your own business as a customer
One of the simplest things you can do is experience your business from the outside.
Don’t look at your website as the person who built it.
Pretend you’ve never heard of your business before.
Start with your homepage.
Can you tell what the business does?
Can you tell who it’s for?
Can you immediately see what makes it different?
Now try to find one of your key products or services.
How many clicks does it take?
Is the information easy to understand?
Can you find the answers you’d need before buying?
And finally:
Can you work out exactly what to do next?
Don’t just test it on yourself, either.
Ask someone who isn’t involved in the business to complete a simple task on your website.
Don’t help them.
Don’t explain where anything is.
Just watch.
Where do they hesitate?
What do they click?
What do they ask?
Where do they get stuck?
Those moments are incredibly valuable.
Because what feels obvious to you may not be obvious to someone encountering your business for the first time.
Make it easier, not louder
When marketing isn’t working, the instinct is often to add more.
More content.
More advertising.
More information.
More offers.
More emails.
But sometimes the answer is the opposite.
Remove the friction.
Make the message clearer.
Reduce unnecessary choices.
Answer the important questions.
Simplify the journey.
Make the next step obvious.
Your customers are already busy.
They’re already making decisions all day.
They don’t need your business to give them another puzzle to solve.
The best marketing doesn’t make people work harder to understand why they should choose you.
It makes choosing you feel easier.
And sometimes the biggest improvement you can make to your marketing isn’t adding something new.
It’s taking away what was getting in the way.
References
Baymard Institute (2026) Cart & Checkout Usability Research. Available at: Baymard Institute (Accessed: 10 September 2026).
Baymard Institute (2026) How to Reduce Cart Abandonment: Data-Backed UX Strategies. Available at: Baymard Institute (Accessed: 10 September 2026).
Baymard Institute (2026) Information Architecture UX. Available at: Baymard Institute (Accessed: 10 September 2026).
Baymard Institute (2025) Checkout UX 2025: 10 Pitfalls and Best Practices. Available at: Baymard Institute (Accessed: 10 September 2026).
