One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is that they hide information. (Yes, you read both that sentence and the title correctly.) For example, lead generation sites want visitors to fill out their "Contact Us" forms, but they hide those forms behind little links. E-commerce sites want visitors to make purchases and wonder why shopping carts get abandoned, when most shopping carts are created for the sole purpose of figuring out what the shipping and handling will be.

But there is some information that really should be hidden from the customer: the really obvious kind.

We have a customer who sells software subscriptions. It's a very complex product and a complex sell. (This is code for "It's hard and we are always in learning mode.") Sometimes we point out features and benefits that the software company isn't using to sell with, and they have a wonderful analogy to explain why they don't mention them. "It's like buying a car," they explain, "You expect to get a steering wheel and four tires. If you don't get them, it's a deal breaker, but it's not a key selling point."So they hide (or more accurately, don't mention) features that their customers just expect.

We have another customer who does the opposite. They are in e-commerce and describe their best-selling products as "Brand New!" It's not awful - just a little strange, because you expect the product to be new. It becomes a problem when you notice that ten products are "Brand New" but the other 290 don't have that description. The visitor absolutely walks away with the sense that the other products are refurbished, reused, recycled, etc. In fact, the practice in their industry it to resell products, and this customer was just pointing out the newness of their best sellers (while ignoring it for their less important products.) If they have to point out that a product is new, it would be better to go with, "New, like all our products."

Similarly, we looked at at an Italian travel site that featured listings for multiple hotels. Periodically, we found rooms that were marked, "air conditioned." Air conditioning in a hotel in the US is like a steering wheel and four tires on a car - you just expect it. But it was mentioned so infrequently that we began to feel that the other rooms weren't air conditioned (the same way that we {incorrectly} began to feel that the other products the e-commerce customer sold weren't new. But in this example, the website owner had correctly highlighted information, because air conditionining really isn't standard in all Italian hotels.)

So these are three different examples, all illustrations of the same problem. The software company understood the issue and kept the obvious information off of their site. The e-commerce company didn't understand the information and by stating the obvious (Brand New!) in only some places, cast a doubt on whether the same information was true about the rest of their products. And the Italian travel site understood the information because in fact, only some rooms are air-conditioned.