## Five synthetic users read the new home page, and four of five would buy

The [synthetic-user study](synthetic-users.html) was run again, against the home page
[v1.25.1](versions.html) rebuilt from a business partner's HTML. Same five invented readers, same
six-step loop, same window sizes, sixty screenshots in total. Both readings are now in one vault,
published read-only, and every persona in it carries two runs.

**The finding the first study made did not recur.** At v1.20.1 the home page never said what the
product was called: *Agent Behaviour Policy* first appeared at character 5,387 of 9,270, and two of
five readers took *"Buy one, from £5"* for an insurance policy costing five pounds. Measured again on
the same window:

| | v1.20.1 | v1.25.1 |
|---|---|---|
| where *Agent Behaviour Policy* first appears | character 5,387 of 9,270 | **character 67 of 6,081** |
| bare *policy* / *policies* in the page body | 6 above the fold alone | **0** |
| *behaviour policy*, qualified | — | **12** |
| insurance-register words above the fold | 10 | **0** |
| screens to the four levels, on a phone | — | 8.9 |

The reader who works in insurance understood on the first screen what took her three pages before.
The reader on a phone, who stalled last time without ever learning what was for sale, reached a
purchase decision. **Four of five would now spend money, against two of five** — which is not a sale,
and two of them said the entry level is cheap enough not to be a decision.

**Seven findings replaced it, and five were fixed the same day.**

- **The bare word, where it survived.** Eighteen vault pages said *Buy this policy* on their primary
  button and [for-corporate](for-corporate.html) said *See a real policy* — the exact phrase two
  readers took for insurance last time. Both now say *behaviour policy*. The first is fixed in
  `build-abp-pages.mjs`, which writes it.
- **One unhedged sentence about somebody else's industry.** *"What earns cover back is a written
  record…"* states as settled a thing only an underwriter decides. [The insurance
  page](insurance.html) already says it conditionally, and that is now the sentence the home page
  carries.
- **Two dated 2026 facts with no source.** The insurance page gives the exclusion's announcement date
  and says why the figures beside it are qualitative; the home page stated both facts bare. It now
  points at the sourced version and says neither is our observation.
- **The line the broker asked for.** *We are not an insurer and place no cover*, beside the two
  admissions the page already volunteers.

**Two were not fixed and are recorded instead.** The vocabulary is split across pages — the home page
says *reach* and *gap* where [the behaviour-policy page](agent-behaviour-policy.html) still says *the
grant* and *the delta* in its own prose, and three readers hit it within two minutes. And every
delivery window on levels 3 and 4 starts from the buyer's reply, so the step with no time on it is
ours; the reader who would have paid £1,500 the same day could not.

**A tooling bug found while doing this, and fixed.** `release.mjs` replaced every `>vX.Y.Z</a>` on
every page, not just the version chip in the header — so a sentence on the study page saying a bug
was fixed in **v1.20.2** was carried forward release by release until it claimed v1.25.1. It now
matches the chip only, and the sentence says v1.20.2 again. A page that names a release in its own
text is a dated record.

**Two corrections to the runner itself**, both of which would have quietly falsified the study: the
page grows while its webfonts settle, so a scroll issued too early lands short; and the site sets
`scroll-behavior: smooth`, so a screenshot 280ms after `scrollTo` catches the page mid-flight — one
step aimed at 4,340px landed at 3,308px and showed a different section. Every step now records the
scroll position it actually reached.