clarity-action

name	clarity-action
description	Stage 6 of the stranger test — friction at the point of action. Audit every conversion moment with the Fogg behavior model (motivation x ability x prompt), interaction cost, form friction, and commitment honesty. Scored 0-10; a broken primary CTA is a journey gate.

clarity-action — the point of action

Everything upstream manufactured motivation; this stage audits whether the site spends it well. Fogg's model: behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt converge — and at the click moment, ability (ease) is cheaper to fix than motivation is to raise. Every extra field, every ambiguous label, every surprise requirement is a tax paid at the moment of maximum intent. Baymard's checkout research quantifies the stakes: ~70% of carts are abandoned, with surprise costs (48%) and forced account creation (~25%) leading the causes — friction and surprise, not desire.

Consume the inventory's CTA census; walk each conversion path as far as it goes without creating real accounts or submitting real data.

Rubric

Check	Weight	What to verify
Label honesty (Krug)	×2.5	The CTA describes the actual next action in the doer's words ("Start free — no card" not "Get Started", "Empower yourself"). The mindless-click test: can the visitor predict exactly what happens after the click?
Singular primary	×2	One visually primary action per screenful; competitors demoted. (Hick's law: decision time grows with alternatives; the CTA moment is the worst place for a menu.)
The click's true cost	×2.5	What actually follows the click: how many fields, how many steps, card required?, email verification walls, forced account creation before value. Count interaction cost (NN/g) end-to-end — and walk past the form to first experienced value: minutes and steps from click until the product visibly does its thing (~10 minutes is the modern patience budget). Value unreachable in the first session (sales call, day-long setup) is major even when the form itself is short.
Surprise audit	×2	Nothing material appears post-click that wasn't disclosed pre-click (price, card, install size, permissions). Surprise at commitment is the Baymard #1 killer, generalized.
Momentum design	×1	Goal-gradient (Kivetz): visible progress accelerates completion — multi-step flows show steps; started states beat blank states. Defaults do the work where honest (Johnson & Goldstein: defaults dominate outcomes) — but pre-checked consent/marketing boxes are dark-pattern findings, not momentum.
Objection at the button	×1	The residual fear at each CTA ("can I undo this?", "will I be spammed?") answered at the button in a microcopy line, not in a FAQ.
Recovery paths	×0.5	Errors and dead ends: does a failed step preserve input and offer one next step?

Anchored bands

• 9–10 — Every primary CTA predicts its outcome exactly; the first click delivers value/progress; zero post-click surprises; objections answered at the button.
• 7–8 — Labels honest; one extra step or one undisclosed minor requirement post-click.
• 5–6 — Generic labels ("Get Started") on primaries, or account-before- value, or two primaries competing on a screenful.
• 3–4 — The path demands commitment before demonstrating value AND hides a material requirement; or the primary is ambiguous about what it does.
• 0–2 — Primary CTA broken, circular, or misleading.

Gate: a dead, ambiguous, or duplicated primary caps the journey at 6.5.

Findings

Directions: label-outcome, primary-singular, value-before-account, disclose-preclick, fields-cut, objection-at-button, progress-visible. Evidence = the CTA label + what the click actually did when you walked it. Dark patterns (pre-checked boxes, disguised declines, guilt-copy opt-outs) are always major+ regardless of conversion impact — this stage audits for the visitor, and detected manipulation is negative trust (see clarity-trust).

Doctrine suppression: one-primary-per-screen doctrines, no-signup-wall doctrines etc. are enforced for the site, not argued against.

References: references/action-experts.md.