| name | clarity-promise |
| description | Stage 1 of the stranger test — audit message match and information scent. Does the page confirm, within one glance, the promise that brought the visitor here? Scored 0-10; a mismatch with the primary entry path is a journey gate. |
clarity-promise — "Is this what I clicked for?"
The visitor arrives holding a promise — an ad, a shared link, a search
snippet, a friend's sentence. The first job of the page is not to persuade;
it is to confirm the scent. Information-foraging research (Pirolli &
Card) models visitors as scent-followers: when the cues on the new patch stop
matching the goal, they go back the way they came. The back button is one
click; the match must be visible in the first glance.
Consume audit/inventory.md — especially the entry matrix and the fold
crop. Score message match per entry-matrix row: channels arrive at different
awareness stages (a paid ad brings problem-aware visitors; a shared link
brings most-aware ones), so one hero can match one channel and break
another. Report the per-channel verdicts; the gate binds on the primary row.
Rubric
| Check | Weight | What to verify |
|---|
| Message match | ×3 | The dominant words of the entry context appear (or are unmistakably paraphrased) in the hero. Ad says X, page says X — not X's clever cousin. |
| Scent continuation | ×2 | The hero extends the promise (what happens next) rather than restarting the pitch from zero — the visitor should feel further along, not re-greeted. |
| Awareness-stage fit (Schwartz) | ×2 | The copy meets the visitor at their awareness stage. Problem-aware traffic needs the problem named before the product; product-aware traffic needs the differentiator, not the category explained. Mismatch reads as either condescension or confusion. |
