The 2-second “Rule” | Hacker News Reader

The 2-second “Rule”

medium.com

43 pointssomeproduct19 comments

> 2. Social - the visitor has clicked a link, typically with accompanying context from those in their network

And often the context is "That's cool", or "Foobaz widget upgraded!". And I click and have absolutely no idea what the website even does.

It happens more often than you might expect - especially with deep links. I'll go to the home page or a faq page first when that happens. And you'll be surprised how often neither of those give even the slightest clue what the site does.

<SARCASTIC>After all it's totally obvious to those who made the site! I mean how could anyone not know what this site does? I spend hours on it every day.</SARCASTIC>

There are an astonishing number of people who have no "Theory of mind" - they simply are unable to put themself in the position of someone else and try to understand what the other person doesn't know.

This is a huge complaint of mine about emails I get from various startups: 'Hey, check it out, we just launched version 2 of our awesome product, X!'

Me: 'I don't remember what product X does, so I'm just going to delete this email.'

I wish more emails would begin with: "Foo is the world's best way to Bar and Baz. You're receiving this email because you joined our service, Foo, in March 2013."

It doesn't matter if you know what your service does. Assume I have absolutely no idea what your service does, even though I signed up for it. Because I don't have any idea what it does.

Except that if someone claims to be the best in something I'll also trash spam the email. There are many other ways to spin a tagline.

Did you read the rest? This applies to YOU:

>"So really there’s potentially only one scenario in which explaining what you do is the top priority:

1. Randomness - most of these visitors won’t be in your target audience anyway"

Just because it says that doesn't make it true.

It's not. He's wrong.

The point seems to be that communicating information has no cash value. It's even counterproductive.

Are most of your site’s visitors arriving with zero context of who you are and what you do? How is that even possible?

Because it was linked from HN, and the title got set to the page's title, and all I know is that there is a new version of some tool, but I don't know

1. what this tool does,

2. why I want what this tool does,

3. similar tools that are out there (if you don't know what these are, you are making me look them up), and

4. the differences you have from the things in group 3 that say this is the right tool for some particular circumstance.

Attempting to define a "rule" in this is what the title should imply is the failure, but it doesn't seem to take that to heart.

What you should be avoiding is having users reach your home page and saying to themselves, "Where am I?" Even if they are random hits -- which happens, and often -- your root page, the one people come in on who aren't going anywhere specific, should make it clear what you do or are, or at least avoid making it unclear.

> What you should be avoiding is having users reach your home page and saying to themselves, "Where am I?"

Strongly agree.

The article itself is an interesting example. "Where am I?" I asked. Apparently on the blog of one Patrick Woods. Personal blog or company blog? Dunno. Eventually, I made it to the Medium homepage. Never heard of Medium. What is it? Time passes ... and I determine that it's sort of a cross between a group blog, Twitter without the character limit, and Reddit.

That took me a couple of minutes. Yes, I know, I could have simply gone to the homepage through the "M" menu, and then clicked on the little "Learn more" link in the lower-left-hand corner, but I didn't know I was supposed to do that.

There is a lesson here. FTA:

> Are most of your site's visitors arriving with zero context of who you are and what you do? How is that even possible?

Most? Maybe, maybe not. But some certainly. I arrived on Medium through a process entirely orthogonal to the purpose of the site: reading an article relevant to startups, chosen from a list of links of interest to hackers.

Studies show that it takes less than a second for visitors to determine - based on appearances - whether or not your site will bring them value. The Nielson Norman Group says that in addition to this, you only have ten seconds to provide written-proof of that value:

> the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users' decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed Web pages in the past. People know that most Web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

> To gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.

> http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-we...

The author is assuming a few things: (a) that most visitors to your site are there because they intended to be and don't need their hand held to get to the next step, (b) that there is only one 'next step' to send them to, and (c) that your short description is a list of bullet-points as opposed to a sentence or two.

For one, I don't think we can assume the intent and understanding of most users. I visit more sites daily that I don't have a clue about than those that I do, but maybe I'm a small percentage. Secondly, depending on the product, I think bullet points can be just as effective as a short blurb (especially if you have a tagline that does a good job summing things up). Pinboard (http://pinboard.in/) is a great example of this.

He's got a point here. You shouldn't have a "we do this and that" tagline displayed in 30pt orange on your home page.

However the HN has a point too, but a part is missing: I should be able to tell what you do in less than 2s if I need to know.

So the tagline needs to be explicit but it can be a small font incrustation beside the logo.

It's true that as a visitor of a website I will often already have an idea of what it is. But when I visit it, the first thing I want to know is whether that was correct.

Yes, all those in-channels imply context - but that context is often very different from place to place. We approach links we found on google differently than ads or links we found on social media and the information that's already given will differ. A simple description, or more broadly, anything that quickly makes clear what you do, isn't primarily for informing random visitors who had no idea, but for quickly getting everyone on the same page no matter where they come from.

I'm all for explaining what you do in such a way that it is also helpful in taking people that already know to the next step - but please, don't skip it entirely.

Same is true for sales-type emails, I'd say. All too often, the mistake is to "sell" the reader in the initial email. That only works if you're selling something incredibly compelling and easy to understand. Most startups don't have that. The goal, then, is more to pique interest; to make the reader want to learn more.

I've learned this lesson first hand more than once, unfortunately. If you make the entire sales argument in an initial email, then you have no chance to drive the conversation. You're giving the reader an opportunity to make a 0 or 1 decision before you even have the chance to explain a bit of the gray areas. Don't do that, if you can help it.

It's analogous to job ads that spend the first 500 words describing what the company is trying to do and how much foosball and dinners yadda yadda, the actual job details being haphazardly compiled at the bottom. Narcissistic business model syndrome.

I was searching for a tool for specific task so I googled some terms that I hoped would be relevant. I clicked on the first 10 links that looked promising into 10 new tabs. Then I looked through these tabs and rapidly closed the ones that at a quick glance didn't give any indication that they might be helpful in solving my problem.

It shouldn't be hard to tell me what problem you are trying to help me to solve, and how you do it differently than everyone else, using a sentence or screenshot or two.

If you can't do that, I suspect that your business model has some more serious problems.

I clicked on the link expecting to see something about food dropped on the ground...

Then I noticed that the site doesn't scroll in my browser when using my keyboard.

That's when I hit Ctrl + w and posted this.

Fixed html element use (or abuse depending on one's prerogative) for the page background is the cause. Disabling them on the page with user css fixes it. I think they're mostly an anti-pattern and poor UX, but a lot of designers and developers love to use them these days, unfortunately.

Using this http://pastie.org/7942978 with user css will disable them for you on any sites you encouter.

Why do sites like this deliberately break things? Even when the window has focus <SPACE> doesn't page down, breaking the way I work. Is there a reason? Or are they just out-of-touch with (some of) their readers?

OT: great typography and design on this page.

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