The Kettle-Stop Audit: Watching a Mate Navigate ChrisJM
There is a particular kind of silence that fills a room when a friend is trying to be polite about your website. I heard it last weekend. My mate Dan had popped round for a brew, and I decided — partly out of curiosity, partly out of a desire to avoid folding the laundry — to ask him a small favour. Find three things on ChrisJM while I made the tea. No time pressure, no clipboard, no lab coat. Just a man, a laptop and the faint gurgle of a kettle.
I did take notes, though. Not because I'm organised, but because I'm nosy. And what I saw in those eight minutes was far more useful than the last handful of tidy-up jobs I'd given myself.
The Brief: Three Things and a Brew
I kept the tasks deliberately plain:
- Find a specific project I'd mentioned to him before — the little archive of unfinished things.
- Find the most recent blog post and tell me what it was about.
- Work out how to get in touch without asking me.
That was it. No 'think aloud' instructions, no stopwatch. I wanted to see what a normal, mildly curious visitor would do when left alone with the site. I also wanted to drink my tea while it was still hot.
Dan is not a designer. He is not a developer. He is, however, exactly the sort of person the site is for: a mate who occasionally wonders what I've been up to, and who might one day recommend me to someone else. In other words, a proper user. Not a stand-in for one.
Wrong Turn One: The Nav Bar Staredown
He opened the homepage, leaned back, and did absolutely nothing for about six seconds. Then he squinted. Then he moved the cursor up to the menu and hovered over each item in turn, as if waiting for one of them to blink first.
'Projects,' he said, eventually. 'That's where the unfinished things would be, yeah?'
He clicked. Then he clicked back almost immediately, because the page had opened with a paragraph about my general approach to making things, and he wasn't sure he was in the right place yet. That paragraph is perfectly nice. I wrote it. But it was acting like a host who talks about the history of the front door before letting you into the house.
He found the project eventually — third card down, after a bit of scrolling — but the pause told me something. My project pages were assuming a visitor who already knew what they were looking at. Dan needed a signpost, not a philosophy.
The Project Pages Needed a Welcome Mat
When he did land on the unfinished-things archive, he laughed, which was the correct response. Then he said: 'So are these things you've actually done, or things you've given up on?'
Fair question. The page explained the idea in my usual roundabout way, but it didn't lead with the simple answer. Dan had to piece it together from headings and a slightly too-clever intro line. He got there, but he did it with a frown, and a frown is not the souvenir I want to hand a visitor.
The fix isn't a redesign. It's a sentence. Maybe two. A plain opening line that says what the shelf is for before I start being charming about it. The kind of thing you'd say if someone walked into your kitchen and asked what was in the slow cooker. 'It's a stew. Sit down.' Not an essay on the history of stewing.
Contact Route: Hiding in Plain Sight
This was the big one. I asked Dan to work out how to get in touch, and he went straight to the footer. Nothing there that looked like an email address. Then he tried the About page, had a scan, came back to the homepage, and eventually said, 'Do I just... reply to one of these blog posts?'
I had a contact page. It was in the main menu. He'd looked at it four times without seeing it.
That's not a Dan problem. That's a me problem. The label was there, but it wasn't doing its job. In a menu of six items, 'Contact' had become wallpaper. He was looking for something that felt like an invitation — a note, a door, a 'say hello' — and I'd given him a filing cabinet label.
By the time I told him where it was, the tea had gone lukewarm. He wasn't annoyed. He was just mildly surprised, the way you are when you find the ketchup at the back of the fridge. It had been there all along, but the fridge wasn't helping.
Why the Sofa Beats the Lab
I've read enough about usability testing to know that proper sessions have scripts, consent forms and people who know what they're doing. This was none of those things. It was two blokes, a laptop and a plate of Custard Creams.
But that's exactly why it worked. Dan wasn't trying to be helpful in the way a paid tester might be. He wasn't being watched by a researcher or worried about giving the 'right' answer. He was just trying to find a thing on a website so he could get back to his tea. That's the most honest feedback you can get.
A lab will tell you where the friction is. A friend on your sofa will tell you where the embarrassment is. Those aren't always the same places. Dan didn't care about my font choices or my spacing. He cared that the project page didn't tell him what it was for, and that the contact link had gone invisible through sheer familiarity.
What I Changed (and What I Left Alone)
I haven't torn the site apart. That would be an overreaction to one afternoon. But I did make three small adjustments:
- I rewrote the opening line of the projects page so it says what the shelf is, plainly, before it gets clever.
- I changed the contact link in the menu to something warmer and less like a form at the doctor's surgery.
- I added a short 'start here' nudge on the homepage for anyone who, like Dan, wants to know what the site is actually for before they start clicking.
I left the rest alone. The colophon is still there. The /now page still exists. The error page still says something daft. Those things are part of the site's character, and Dan didn't trip over them. He tripped over the basics: where am I, what is this, and how do I say hello.
If you run a personal site, I'd recommend the kettle-stop audit. Don't call it a test. Don't make a thing of it. Just ask someone to find three things while you make the tea, then watch what they do. The notes you take will be worth more than the brew, and the brew will be worth more than another afternoon of fiddling with the footer.
And if you're reading this, Dan: yes, the contact page is obvious now. You were right. Milk, no sugar, next time.
