A diagnostic built on pattern recognition

Distinct Vintage LLC is a Wisconsin-based AI, UX, design, and conversion agency founded by Mara Thorsrud, a UX strategist with more than twenty years of experience and a deep working knowledge of design psychology behind the work.

The Hesitation Audit™ is its flagship diagnostic.

Why this exists

For two decades, I watched smart teams ship the right thing and still lose the user. Not because the button was the wrong color, but because the breakdown was almost always somewhere quieter. A moment of doubt or a flicker of "wait, am I sure?"

That moment is hesitation. Analytics will show you the drop but they can’t really show you the why behind it. Most audits don't get there either, they count clicks or flag friction points and hand over a list of fixes that treat only the symptom. The drop-off might even move a little, but the underlying behavior is still happening, and a month later the team is still asking why.

I built The Hesitation Audit because I got tired of watching teams patch surfaces when the real problem was psychological. The work needed a different lens, so I built one.

What I actually believe

Conversion is a behavioral and emotional problem dressed up in performance metrics. Every drop-off has a feeling behind it, a doubt, or fatigue, distrust, or overwhelm. If you can name the feeling, you can change the moment. If you can only describe the click path, you're missing half of the problem.

This is the work I care about. The psychology underneath the funnel.

The Hesitation Audit is structured around that lens. The Signal Report™ shows where users are dropping off. The Mindset Map™ shows what they're feeling when they do. The AI & Leverage Map™ identifies the highest-leverage moments to intervene. The Confidence Blueprint™ defines the changes that earn back trust. The Proof Plan™ measures whether it worked. Five connected views of the same problem, ending in something you can actually act on.

That arc, by design, is the opposite of a teardown. It's a diagnosis you can move on.

What I bring to the work

• 20+ years in UX strategy and product design

• Director-level leadership across enterprise and product organizations

• Deep work at the intersection of behavioral psychology, conversion, and AI augmentation

Twenty years of watching where people hesitate, across dozens of products, gives you a kind of muscle memory for it. That's what this diagnostic is built on.

Not sure where to start?

Take the quiz to find out what your user hesitations might be about, then use the benchmark tool to understand how much they're costing you.