Questions

No. The course teaches a diagnostic method, not a statistical one. The experiments are presented as evidence, and you are never asked to compute anything. If you have run tests before, you will get an additional layer out of the prediction exercises — but prior testing experience is not assumed anywhere in the material.

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. The numbers are not coefficients and you cannot plug values in to produce a conversion rate. They express relative influence — an ordering derived from a very large body of experiments. The heuristic is a thinking sequence that tells you what to look at, and in what order.

Because the course is partly about demonstrating that marketers, as a population, misjudge what moves conversion — and in a measurable direction. A result shown to a passive room is trivia. The same result shown to a room that just voted the other way changes how people work. You will be asked to commit before every reveal, and the commitment is the point.

Because they are, and that is deliberate on two counts.

The first is confidentiality. Every experiment in this course was run with a real research partner on a real revenue-generating page. A recent test result is a live competitive asset — publishing this quarter's winner would hand a partner's competitors the answer they are paying to find out for themselves. So we teach from experiments where enough time has passed that showing the pages costs the partner nothing. That is a condition of the research relationship, not an oversight. The very current work exists; it stays private, and it stays private for exactly the reason you would want it to if the page were yours.

The second is that these are classics — selected over years of teaching because each one isolates a single principle cleanly. What they teach does not age. Perception is still a reconstruction. Competing information still costs you decisions. Fear is still disproportionate to risk. The interface fashions have turned over several times since these pages ran; the cognition they act on has not.

There is a teaching benefit in the dated look, too. When a page is visually current, rooms argue about aesthetics. When it obviously is not, the argument moves to structure — which is the only thing worth arguing about, and the only thing that transfers to the page you will ship next week.

For the in-class labs, yes; some lab pages are assigned rather than chosen, and competitor pages are deliberately part of the mix. For the Session 1 assignment, no: use a page you are personally responsible for. Ownership is what makes the corrective real rather than academic, and it is what lets you act on the finding.

Friction is psychological resistance stimulated by a given element in the process — the cost of doing. Anxiety is psychological concern stimulated by a given element in the process — the cost of contemplating what might go wrong. They carry equal weight in the heuristic and demand opposite responses: friction is removed, anxiety is met.

No. Session 2 opens with a retrieval gauntlet on Session 1 material and its labs assume you can apply the heuristic unaided. Attending Session 2 without Session 1 is not productive. Attending Session 1 alone gives you the diagnostic frame but only one of the two cost forces.

Worksheets are distributed in class and are yours to keep. Availability of the slide deck after the sessions is at the instructor's discretion — ask in the room. Note that a substantial part of the deck's value depends on not having seen the results in advance.

Open your highest-value page and write down what you believe the visitor is afraid of at the exact moment they are asked to act. If you cannot write that sentence, you are not yet ready to optimize the page — you are only ready to redesign it. Those are different activities, and only one of them has a measurable result.

Strongly recommended, not strictly required. Day Two opens the v term of the Conversion Sequence Heuristic taught on Day One, and the intensive assumes you can already tell friction from anxiety. If you are joining Day Two cold, work through Unit One and Unit Two of the on-demand library first.

Then you have the error of substance, and you will find that out on Day Two rather than after another quarter of underperforming campaigns. That is a useful outcome. In practice, most organisations that believe they are undifferentiated have exclusivity they have never articulated — the intensive is frequently where it surfaces.

No. Positioning describes the place you intend to occupy in a market. A value proposition is the specific answer a specific prospect reaches at a specific moment on a specific page. Positioning statements are one of the more common sources of the error of form, because they are written to be approved internally rather than concluded externally.

Yes. The heuristic is indifferent to cycle length. Long cycles usually raise mental cost and place more weight on credibility, which makes them productive material for the intensive rather than awkward material.

Less than half. Session 3 carries most of the instruction; Session 4 front-loads the remaining framework and then hands the room over to application. The culminating intensive is the longest single block of the day.

Bring what you can. The stages work on a headline and a subhead alone. If commercial sensitivity is a real constraint, tell the instructor at the start of Session 3 and the challenge stage will be run in a smaller group.

You leave with one corrected value proposition and the fastest test for it. Units Three, Four and Five of the on-demand library continue the work, and the AI Tutor is available to pressure-test rewrites against the heuristic between sessions.