In a hundred-degree week in a city with no air conditioning, nobody waits for your homepage animation.
Nobody in this situation is browsing
It is a hundred and four and the house has no cooling at all. Ice brought a limb down across the service drop. Water is coming in where the gutter overflowed for the third night running.
They are not assessing your workmanship. Three things, fast: you handle ductless heads, you come to Sellwood, this is the number.
A heat wave here is a genuine emergency
In a housing stock built without cooling, a sustained heat event is dangerous rather than uncomfortable, particularly for older residents. The people searching are frightened.
Put your response time and your waitlist position high on the page in plain words. Honesty about a two-week wait wins more goodwill than silence does.
Assume everything is against you
Everyone rings at once in a heat event or an ice storm, old basements swallow reception, and a phone near empty throttles itself. Those three arrive together.
Build for the customer out on an old Portland basement and the comfortable one takes care of itself. Words first, images after, nothing standing between the caller and your number.
Buttons a wet or hurried thumb can hit
Rain on the glass throws off every touch, and a hot hurried hand is no better. Small links crowded together do not get pressed.
Make the call button genuinely large, keep it on screen as the page scrolls, and leave empty space around it so nothing else takes the tap from a hand that has been dealing with a ductless head for an hour.
Put a stopwatch on it
Next basement job with weak signal, try to book yourself through your own form and time it.
The number usually lands badly. What you approved on a monitor is not what a customer meets in a hot house.
