The words in your report.

We write reports to be read by whoever maintains your site, so we keep the vocabulary small. These are the fourteen terms that carry real meaning in ours, and what each of them decides.

User journey: A goal a visitor is trying to reach on your site, such as buying a pair of shoes in a given size or booking an appointment. It is the unit our pricing is built on, because what matters is not how many pages your site has but how many things a customer actually comes to do.
Thinking aloud: The habit we ask testers to keep while they use your site. They narrate what they are looking for, what they expect a button to do and what surprises them. Most of what makes a report useful comes from these sentences rather than from where the cursor went.
Friction: Anything that slows a visitor down without stopping them outright. A label that means two things, a form that asks for a postcode before a country, a price that moves between two screens. Friction rarely produces complaints, which is why it survives for years.
Blocking obstacle: A point where a visitor cannot continue at all. The order never happens, and nothing in your analytics explains why. These are the findings we rank first, because they cost the most and are usually the cheapest to repair.
Severity: The three rungs we use to rank every finding. Critical stops the visitor completely. Major costs sales without stopping anyone. Minor is friction worth removing when the more expensive problems are gone. The ranking tells you what to fix on Monday morning, not merely what is imperfect.
Completion rate: The share of testers who reached the goal they were given. Three out of five finishing a checkout is a number, and the two who stopped are the reason you commissioned the study.
Verbatim: A tester's own words, quoted exactly as they said them. We keep them intact because a sentence like I am not going to fight with this carries something no summary of it can.
Technical QA: The hunt for defects that run alongside the usability study: broken links, forms that fail in silence, layouts that collapse on one browser. Every defect comes with the device, the browser and the steps to reproduce it, so a developer can act without asking you a single question. It is included in all three audits.
Marked-up report: What we deliver. Your obstacles ranked from most to least costly, each one carrying what happened, why it costs you and what to change. It is written to be forwarded to whoever maintains your site, which is why it reads as instructions rather than as observations.
Panel: The group of testers assigned to your audit, matched to your market, language, country and device. Three on an Essential audit, five on an In-depth, seven on a Full audit. They are people who shop and book online, not usability professionals, because a site that only works for experts does not work.
Funnel: The sequence of steps between a visitor arriving and an order being placed. Analytics tells you which step loses people. A usability audit tells you what happened at that step, in the visitor's own words.
Cart abandonment: A visitor who fills a basket and leaves before paying. It is the most measured symptom in online retail and one of the least explained, because the cause almost always sits on a screen the numbers cannot see into.
Desktop and mobile: Two devices, and two different sites in practice. A journey that works on a laptop can break on a phone through nothing more than a keyboard covering the field being filled. In-depth and Full audits cover both and compare what each panel did.
Business day: How our delivery deadline is counted. Five business days from payment, weekends excluded, in Eastern Time. An audit paid on Friday is delivered the following Friday.

Now see them applied to your own site.

Real testers, one report, seven business days. The words above are what it will be written in.

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