No, not ghosts, before anyone asks!
I don’t have a sixth sense, I don’t wear a tin foil hat, and I certainly don’t spend my evenings looking for UFOs. But I do have a habit of spotting things that don’t quite feel right.
You know that feeling when you’re convinced you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t work out what it is? Or when you walk into a room and think, “Hang on… I’ve interrupted something here.” It’s that little voice in your head that tells you something isn’t quite adding up.
Mine usually appears when I’m walking past businesses.
The other day I walked past a café with six A-boards outside. One was advertising breakfast, another coffee, another homemade cakes, another today’s specials… by the time I’d looked at them all, I’d almost forgotten what I’d originally stopped for.
Instead of making it easier for me to decide, they’d made the decision harder.
Then my brain did what it always does.
I started wondering how somebody with a visual impairment would get through that pavement safely, and whether the café owner had ever stepped back and looked at it through the eyes of a customer instead of their own.
That might sound like an odd thing to think about, but it’s how my brain has always worked.
I Notice Things…
It isn’t just when I’m out walking, either.
The other day I spotted an advert in a magazine for a brand-new gym opening not too far from me.
The advert caught my attention straight away. The branding looked great, the photography was excellent and, for a moment, I thought, “I wonder where that is?”
Then I realised…
It didn’t actually say.
Not on the advert.
Not anywhere.
So I visited their website.
Still nothing.
No address. No location. No clue where this new gym was opening.
Now, I appreciate that this probably wasn’t intentional. Whoever designed the advert had clearly put a lot of thought into making it look good, but they’d overlooked one tiny detail that mattered.
After a couple of minutes of searching, I gave up and left the website.
Just like that, they’d potentially lost an enquiry.
Not because the business wasn’t any good.
Not because the advert wasn’t eye-catching.
Simply because one small piece of information was missing.
That’s the sort of thing I notice all the time.
Not because I’m looking for faults.
But because I spend my days thinking about what it’s like to be the customer.
Sometimes the smallest details have the biggest impact.
A missing address.
Too many signs.
A phone number that’s impossible to find.
A website that assumes people already know the answer.
They’re all tiny things on their own.
But together, they shape the experience people have of your business.