The plastic needles of this artificial balsam fir are digging into my cuticles, and for the life of me, I cannot remember why I thought untangling 444 feet of Christmas lights in the middle of a sweltering July afternoon was a productive use of my Tuesday. My fingers are stained with a weird, metallic residue, and the air in the garage is thick enough to chew. It’s a mess of my own making, much like the digital landscapes we build for our customers. We think that by laying everything out-every cord, every bulb, every technical specification-we are being helpful. In reality, we are just handing them a box of knots and asking them to find the plug.

I was talking to Rachel J.D. about this yesterday. She spends her days as a dyslexia intervention specialist, which means she spends her life looking at how the human brain stutters when faced with hostile information design. She told me that for most of her students, a wall of text isn’t a resource; it’s a threat. It’s a physical barrier. When a customer lands on a website that lists 14 different grades of steel and 234 possible dimensions without context, they aren’t ‘informed.’ They are under siege. They read the entire page, twice, and yet they still pick up the phone to ask, ‘Will this hold my lawnmower?’ This isn’t because they are lazy. It’s because the website failed to translate data into safety.

The Illusion of Clarity

We often assume that more information equals more clarity. We stock our FAQ pages with 54 specific scenarios, thinking we’ve covered every base. But clarity isn’t the volume of noise; it’s the frequency of the signal. If I give you a map that shows every single blade of grass between here and the coast, you’ll never find the highway. You’ll just stand there, paralyzed by the sheer detail of the lawn. This is the ‘Curse of Knowledge’ in its most corporate form. We know our products so well that we forget what it’s like to not know. We protect ourselves from the responsibility of a wrong recommendation by burying the ‘right’ answer under a mountain of ‘possible’ answers. If you choose the wrong one after we gave you all the facts, well, that’s on you, isn’t it? It’s a subtle, perhaps unconscious, way for sellers to avoid the weight of the sale.

Clarity is the degree to which someone can confidently act.

The Weight of the Sale

Rachel pointed out that when her students encounter a complex sentence, they often lose the beginning before they reach the end. The same thing happens to a buyer trying to navigate a complex industrial purchase. They see ’24-gauge corrugation’ and ‘Corten steel’ and ‘ISO-compliant locking mechanisms.’ By the time they get to the price-say, $4554-they have lost the thread of why these features actually matter to their specific problem. They aren’t looking for a container; they are looking for a dry place to put their grandmother’s antique furniture. When the technical specs don’t explicitly say, ‘Your grandmother’s dresser will not mold in here,’ the buyer feels a rising tide of uncertainty. That uncertainty is the direct result of the information we provided, not the lack of it.

I’ve made this mistake myself. I once spent 14 days building a spreadsheet for a client that outlined 44 different ways we could approach their marketing. I thought I was being thorough. I thought I was showing my value. The client looked at the 44 options, thanked me for the hard work, and then never called me again. I had paralyzed them. I had turned a simple decision into a research project they didn’t have time to complete. I suspect that most ‘detailed’ websites are doing the exact same thing to their visitors every single hour of the day. They are turning buyers into reluctant students of an industry they have no interest in joining.

Information overload is a shield, not a service.

Speaking Plainly

The contrarian truth is that the more you explain, the more you might actually be confusing the situation. We use jargon as a shortcut, but it acts as a gate. If a customer has to Google a term on your site just to understand your product description, you’ve lost them. They are now on someone else’s tab. This is particularly true in heavy equipment and logistics. You’d think a steel box would be a simple purchase, but the industry has managed to wrap it in so many layers of ‘shipping-speak’ that the average person feels like they need a maritime law degree just to buy a shed.

When you finally find a resource that speaks plainly, like the team at AM Shipping Containers, the relief is palpable. You realize that you don’t actually need to know the chemical composition of the paint; you just need to know that the door won’t rust shut in 4 years.

Chunking the Complexity

Rachel J.D. uses a technique with her students called ‘chunking.’ It’s the process of taking a massive amount of data and breaking it into small, digestible, and-most importantly-actionable pieces. If we applied this to our websites, we would stop listing every feature and start asking, ‘What are you trying to protect?’ or ‘How much space do you have?’ Instead of giving the customer 154 facts and asking them to build a solution, we should be giving them 4 paths and asking them which one looks like home.

Courage to Be Simple

I look back at these Christmas lights, now a tangled ball of green wire and 4 broken bulbs. I could write a 34-page manual on how to untangle them. I could list the tension limits of the wire and the electrical resistance of the sockets. But none of that helps. What helps is if someone grabs the other end and says, ‘Pull here.’ That’s what a good salesperson does. That’s what a good website should do. It should be the person holding the other end of the wire, making the path clear rather than explaining the physics of the knot.

We fear that if we don’t include every detail, we will look unprofessional or under-equipped. We worry that the one customer who actually wants to know the floor load rating per square inch will be disappointed. So, we cater to the 4% of outliers and end up alienating the 94% of people who just want a solution. It is a failure of courage. It takes courage to be simple. It takes courage to say, ‘You don’t need to worry about that part, here is what matters for you.’

The Stones of the Bridge

I remember a specific case Rachel told me about. A student was trying to read a story about a bridge. The text was filled with adjectives describing the stone, the mortar, the architectural style, and the history of the mason. The student was exhausted before the main character even stepped onto the bridge. To that student, the bridge didn’t exist; only the stones did. Many buyers are in that exact position. They are staring at the stones of your product- the specs, the lead times, the logistical hurdles-and they can’t even see the bridge that’s supposed to take them from their problem to their solution.

If your phone is ringing with ‘basic’ questions, don’t blame the caller. Don’t assume they didn’t read the page. Assume they read it and found it wanting. Assume that your 124-point bulleted list didn’t answer the one question they actually had: ‘Can I trust this to work for me?’ Trust isn’t built with data points. It’s built with empathy. It’s built by acknowledging that the buyer is probably stressed, likely in a hurry, and definitely doesn’t want to become an expert in your field just to make a one-time purchase.

Starting Over

I’m going to put these lights away now. Or maybe I’ll just throw them out and buy new ones in December. Sometimes, the cost of untangling a mess is higher than the cost of starting over with something simpler. That is the ultimate risk of a complex website: eventually, your customers will decide that the mental energy required to understand you is more expensive than your competitor’s higher price tag. They will pay for the person who makes them feel smart, rather than the person who makes them feel informed. And in the end, that is a choice that makes sense to all 4 corners of the brain.