I’m currently staring at a small, jagged piece of cedar sitting on my desk, just 2 millimeters away from my keyboard. I finally got the splinter out after 12 minutes of digging with a pair of dull tweezers and a needle that I probably should have sterilized better. The relief is physical, a quiet hum in my thumb where the sharp pressure used to be. It’s funny how something so small can occupy 52 percent of your brain’s processing power until it’s gone. You don’t realize how much you were compensating for the pain until the obstruction is removed. This little sliver of wood was an unwanted innovation in my afternoon, a ‘feature’ of my backyard deck that nobody asked for, and it reminds me exactly of why most small business websites are failing their owners.

Yesterday, I tried to look up a local accounting firm. I won’t name them, but let’s say their name sounds like something you’d find in a dusty ledger. I expected a phone number, a list of services, maybe a photo of a guy in a sensible sweater. Instead, I was met with a full-screen video of a misty forest. There was no text, just the mist. I waited 22 seconds for something to happen. Finally, a small, elegant word faded into view: Evolve. I scrolled down, but the page wouldn’t move normally. It was ‘scroll-hijacked,’ meaning the website decided how fast I should be allowed to move. Every time I flicked my wrist, the screen would jump to a new high-definition image of a mountain peak with a single sentence about ‘Synergy.’ By the time I found the navigation menu-which was hidden behind three tiny lines in the top right corner that looked more like a decorative smudge than a button-I had lost all interest in their tax preparation skills. They were trying so hard to be cool that they forgot to be an accounting firm.

The Delusion of Global Vague

This is the Great Apple Delusion. We see a global behemoth with 222 billion dollars in cash reserves putting a single, glowing laptop on a white background and we think, ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s the secret.’ We assume that because Apple is minimalist and ‘cool,’ our local plumbing supply or law practice should be too. But we are ignoring the 42 years of brand-building that Apple did before they earned the right to be that vague. When you are a global icon, you can afford to be a mystery. When you are a business trying to pay a 12-month lease on a commercial space in a strip mall, mystery is just another word for a bounce rate. You are not Apple. Your customers aren’t coming to you to join a cult of design; they are coming to you because their basement is flooding or they need to know if they can write off their home office.

Clarity is a form of politeness that most designers are too arrogant to practice.

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The Shoplifter’s Paradise

I spent some time talking about this with Greta F., a retail theft prevention specialist who has spent the last 32 years watching how people move through physical spaces. She has a very specific, almost clinical way of looking at environments. Greta doesn’t care about the ‘vibe’ of a store; she cares about the sightlines. She told me once that the most ‘innovative’ store layouts-the ones with curved walls, dim lighting, and artistic displays that block the view of the exit-are a shoplifter’s paradise.

‘When you make a space confusing to look at,’ she said, ‘you create shadows where things get lost.’ In her world, those lost things are high-end electronics or designer handbags. In the digital world, those lost things are your leads.

Greta F. explained that a customer who feels disoriented is a customer who is looking for the door, not the cash register. She’s seen it 82 times in the last month alone: a store tries to look ‘high-end’ by removing signs, and suddenly the honest customers can’t find the dressing rooms and the dishonest ones find the blind spots. Your website is doing the same thing when you hide your ‘Contact Us’ button to preserve the ‘clean aesthetic’ of the header. You are creating a blind spot for your own revenue. You are essentially inviting your potential clients to leave and go to the competitor whose website looks like it was built in 2012 but clearly displays a phone number in the top right corner.

I was so focused on the ‘wow’ factor that I ignored the ‘how’ factor. How do they buy? How do they help? How do they trust me?

The Foundation of Obviousness

If you look at the most successful small business websites, they rarely win awards at design festivals. They win at the bank. They are built on a foundation of obviousness. This is where wordpress website maintenance packages tend to deviate from the ‘agency’ norm. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with every new project, they focus on the boring stuff that actually works: load speeds that don’t make people want to throw their phones, layouts that a grandmother could navigate, and clear calls to action. It’s about maintenance and reliability over flash. A website that works 100 percent of the time is infinitely cooler than a website that looks like a Pixar movie but breaks 12 percent of the time on mobile devices.

There is a psychological cost to ‘cool.’ Every time you ask a user to figure out a new way of navigating-like a side-scrolling horizontal layout or a menu that only appears when you hover over a specific pixel-you are burning their cognitive load. Most people only have about 12 units of mental energy to spend on a service search before they get frustrated. If you use 10 of those units just to help them find your ‘About’ page, you only have 2 units left to actually convince them to hire you. That is a losing mathematical equation.

Trapped by Good Design

Greta F. once told me about a department store that replaced all their standard ‘Exit’ signs with sleek, brushed-metal plaques that had tiny, elegant engraving. During a minor fire drill, people couldn’t find the way out because their brains were looking for the ‘standard’ red sign, not the ‘cool’ metal one. They were literally trapped by good design. Your customers feel that same sense of low-level panic when they can’t find your pricing or your location. They might not be in physical danger, but their time is burning, and they will leave the building rather than try to decode your genius.

If you want to be innovative, innovate in your service. Innovate in how you treat your employees or how you solve a specific problem for your clients. But when it comes to the interface between your business and the world, be as boring as possible. Be as clear as a glass of water. Use the standard icons. Put the phone number where people expect it. Use high-contrast text that doesn’t require a magnifying glass. The most ‘cool’ thing a business can do in 2022 is actually be easy to deal with. Everything else is just a splinter in the thumb of your user experience, and eventually, they’re going to find the tweezers and pull you out of their life for good.

Why are we so afraid of being obvious? Is it because we think obviousness implies a lack of creativity? Or is it because we’re trying to hide the fact that our actual business isn’t that different from the guy down the street? If your only differentiator is a ‘cool’ website, you don’t have a business; you have a digital art project. Real authority comes from the confidence to be plain. It comes from knowing that your value is so high that you don’t need to wrap it in 52 layers of parallax scrolling and auto-playing background music to get people to notice.

I’m going to throw this splinter in the trash now. It’s 32 degrees outside, the sun is hitting the desk, and for the first time in an hour, I can actually think about my work instead of my thumb. That is the feeling you want your customers to have when they land on your page. Not ‘Wow, look at those graphics,’ but ‘Oh, thank god, I finally found what I was looking for.’ Which one of those reactions do you think leads to a $1002 invoice being paid? The answer is as obvious as a red ‘Exit’ sign.