Your Website Has a Decision Problem.

Jana Schilling

Oct 8

8 min read

Your website doesn't just need to explain what you do. It needs to help people decide whether you're right for them.

There is a particular kind of website that frustrates me. It looks good, the copy is professional, the services are clearly presented, and there are testimonials, case studies and maybe even a few impressive numbers. Everything seems to be in place. And yet, after spending five minutes on it, I still don't know whether I should contact the company.

Not because I don't understand what they do, but because I don't understand whether what they do is right for me. Which is a rather unfortunate outcome for a website that's presumably supposed to generate business.

Explaining your business isn't the same as helping someone make a decision

Most companies approach their websites as an exercise in presenting information. They explain who they are, what they offer, how they work and what they've achieved. All perfectly reasonable things to communicate, but they're primarily questions about the company rather than the person visiting its website.

Your visitors arrive with questions of their own. Is this what I actually need? Will this work for a business like mine? What makes this approach different from the alternatives? What would working together involve, and is it worth the investment? Depending on what you're selling, these questions can be far more important than another explanation of your methodology or a detailed history of your company.

A website can answer every question about the business and still leave most of the visitor's questions unanswered. The information might be accurate, the positioning might be clear, and the design might be excellent. None of that automatically makes it easier for someone to decide whether to work with you.

More information isn't necessarily more helpful

When businesses notice that their websites aren't generating enough enquiries, the instinct is often to add something. Another service page, more testimonials, a longer explanation of the process or another call to action. Sometimes that's exactly what's missing, but often the website already contains plenty of information. The problem is that visitors are left to figure out which parts are relevant to their particular situation.

Imagine you're looking for marketing support and find an agency offering brand strategy, performance marketing, SEO, social media, content creation and website development. You now know what the agency offers, but you haven't necessarily learned anything that helps you decide whether it's the right partner for your business.

Should you hire them to build an internal marketing function? Are they the right people to speak to if your positioning is unclear? Do they work with companies at your stage? Will they challenge your assumptions or simply execute whatever you ask them to do? The service list doesn't answer any of those questions, and adding another six services probably won't help.

This is where I think many websites confuse completeness with usefulness. Businesses want to make sure they've mentioned everything they can do, when the more valuable exercise would be figuring out what potential customers actually need to understand before they can make a decision.

A good website makes distinctions

One of the most useful things a business can do is explain not only what it offers, but under which circumstances that offer makes sense. Who is a particular service suitable for? What kind of problem does it solve? What needs to be in place before it becomes useful? And when would the company recommend something else entirely?

These distinctions help people evaluate an offer, but they also require the business to take a position. It's relatively easy to say you provide tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes. It's considerably harder to explain which problems you're genuinely equipped to solve, where your approach works best and which projects you would rather not take on.

That kind of specificity can feel uncomfortable because it means accepting that not everyone who visits your website should become a customer. Businesses often want their websites to appeal to as many people as possible, so they avoid making statements that might exclude someone. The result is frequently a website that sounds agreeable to everyone but gives nobody a particularly compelling reason to choose the company.

Being more specific might reduce the number of enquiries you receive, but it can also improve their quality. Someone who understands what you do, why you do it that way and whether it fits their situation is likely to enter the conversation with much clearer expectations.

Your visitors shouldn't have to do all the strategic work

I sometimes get the impression that companies expect visitors to arrive at their websites with a perfectly formulated brief. They're supposed to understand their problem, know which service will solve it, compare the available options and then contact the appropriate provider. How convenient. The customer does all the thinking, and the company gets the enquiry.

But that's not always how buying decisions work, particularly when you're selling complex services. Someone might know that their marketing isn't performing without knowing whether the underlying problem is positioning, execution, measurement, internal capabilities or something else entirely. Presenting six service categories doesn't necessarily help them figure that out.

A useful website can provide some of that orientation by demonstrating how the company thinks about the problems its customers face. That doesn't mean diagnosing every possible business challenge on a landing page or pretending that complex situations have simple answers. It means offering enough context for visitors to recognize their situation and understand which direction might make sense.

For example, a marketing consultancy could explain why investing in more advertising might be premature when the business hasn't established a clear positioning. A website agency could explain when a complete redesign is justified and when improving the existing website would be more sensible. A brand consultancy could distinguish between a company that needs a new identity and one that simply needs to apply its existing strategy more consistently.

None of this requires giving away an entire consulting engagement. It simply means demonstrating judgment, which is often what customers are trying to evaluate in the first place.

Good UX is about reducing uncertainty, not just reducing clicks

There's an established principle in user experience research that helps explain why this matters. Nielsen Norman Group calls it information scent: the clues people use to predict whether a link or page will lead them toward what they're looking for. When those clues are weak or ambiguous, visitors have to work harder to determine whether they're in the right place. A page can contain the answer someone needs and still fail because the visitor has no good reason to believe the answer is there.

A concrete example of a more decision-oriented approach comes from the UK Government's design system. It includes a pattern called Check a service is suitable, which helps people determine whether a particular government service is appropriate for their circumstances. Instead of expecting users to interpret every requirement independently, the pattern guides them through relevant questions and helps them understand whether they should proceed.

Of course, choosing a marketing consultancy isn't the same as applying for a government service. But the underlying principle is relevant: when an organization understands the requirements and limitations of what it offers, it can use that knowledge to help people make better decisions rather than expecting them to work everything out themselves.

And if even a government website can acknowledge that users might need help figuring out whether a service is right for them, perhaps the rest of us can manage it too.

Helping someone decide also means accepting that they might decide against you

There's an important trade-off here. The more clearly you explain who your services are for and under which circumstances they make sense, the easier you make it for some people to conclude that you're not the right choice.

I don't see that as a problem. If your website makes it clear that you're not equipped for a particular type of project, you've saved both sides an unnecessary conversation. If someone realizes they're not ready for your service yet, they might return when they are. And if someone recognizes their exact situation in the way you describe a problem, you've created a much stronger foundation for a conversation than you would have with another generic promise about delivering exceptional results.

Of course, there are limits to what a website can accomplish. Some decisions require a conversation, a proposal or a deeper understanding of the business. Nobody should expect a website to replace an entire sales process, especially when the service is complex or highly customized.

But the website should help people understand why taking that next step would be worthwhile. It should reduce uncertainty rather than simply transferring it to the sales team.

The real question isn't whether your website explains everything

When reviewing a website, I would spend less time asking whether every service, capability and company achievement has been mentioned, and more time examining the decisions visitors are expected to make.

What do they need to understand before they can determine whether your offer is relevant? Which questions might prevent them from moving forward? What distinctions would help them compare their options? And what information is taking up space without contributing anything useful to that decision?

The answers will depend on the business. A straightforward ecommerce purchase requires a different kind of guidance than choosing a strategic consulting partner. A visitor who already knows exactly what they need has different expectations from someone who's still trying to understand their problem. There isn't one universal website structure that solves all of this, and pretending otherwise would miss the point.

What matters is approaching the website from the perspective of the decisions people need to make, rather than simply the information the company wants to present. That shift can influence everything from positioning and page structure to copywriting, navigation and calls to action.

The Change Strategies position

At Change Strategies, we don't believe a website should be designed around everything a company wants to say about itself. We believe it should be designed around what its customers need to understand.

That distinction has practical consequences. Before discussing layouts, visual concepts or how many pages a website needs, we want to understand the business, the people it's trying to reach and the decisions those people are making. What are they comparing? What concerns might stop them from moving forward? What would make someone a good fit for the company, and what would make them a poor one?

Those questions belong to marketing strategy, not just website design. They influence which information deserves attention, how services are presented, what the website should explain and where a conversation with the company becomes necessary.

We also don't think every visitor needs to be pushed toward an enquiry. Sometimes the most useful thing a website can do is help someone realize that a particular service isn't right for them. That's not a lost conversion. It's a better-informed decision.

Ultimately, we judge a website by more than its appearance, its technical performance or the number of calls to action it contains. We want to know whether it communicates the business accurately, helps the right people recognize its value and gives them enough confidence to take an appropriate next step.

A website that looks good and explains everything may still leave visitors uncertain. A website that helps them make a decision is doing something considerably more valuable.