How to read your friction report

One visual voice per kind of content

Reports keep a strict separation between kinds of statements, so you always know what you’re reading:

• Analysis — BuyerJourney’s own verdicts and reasoning, in plain text on the page.
• Persona voice — a fictional buyer’s own words, always in italic monospace with a FICTIONAL PERSONA tag. These are simulated perspectives and are never presented as real people.
• Evidence — quotes, screenshots, and interaction records from the actual page, shown in upright monospace blocks. This is what grounds a finding.
• Severity — every finding carries a labelled severity chip. Color never carries meaning on its own.
• Confidence — how well the cited evidence supports the finding as stated.

How much weight to put on a finding

Findings are directional, evidence-linked hypotheses — the fast first pass of buyer-perspective thinking, not statistical proof. A good working rule:

1. Check the evidence first. Every finding links to what the persona actually saw. If the evidence doesn’t convince you, discount the finding.
2. Fix the obvious cheaply. Unclear promise, missing proof, unanswered objections — these are usually worth fixing without further validation.
3. Validate the expensive. If a finding implies a redesign, a pricing change, or a repositioning, treat it as the hypothesis to put in front of real buyers or an A/B test — not as the verdict.

Re-running after a fix

Reports are most useful in pairs: run, fix, run again. The before/after comparison shows whether the friction a persona hit is actually gone, and is how teams turn a one-off check into a working ritual.