Don’t say ‘it will take five minutes’

It’s commonplace to emphasize that your product will let users achieve their goal in next to no time:

“Follow one of our quickstart guides to get started in minutes.” - Firebase quickstart

“Be up & running with Pusher in 3 minutes” - Pusher tutorials

“Learn how to build an Android Chat App in 10 minutes” - Pusher tutorials

“Deploy a serverless microservice With Lambda, API Gateway in ~2 minutes” - AWS console

There are two possible reactions to this:

The optimist. “Just five minutes!”, he thinks, “let’s do it!” One hour later, when he is still installing Gradle, he now thinks: “Five minutes?! I must be a fool. I give up 😭”
The realist. “Surely it can’t take five minutes. I can’t believe a word this says. 😒”

Other guides are more honest:

“You can go through the whole tutorial in a couple of hours or you may want to spend a pleasant day really digging into it.” - AngularJS tutorial

“25 min read” - Nix by Example post on Medium

I believe this approach is more successful. Consider our characters again:

The optimist. “Two hours? I bet I can do it in an hour.” Two hours later, he thinks: “Well ... okay, it did say it would take two hours.”
The realist. “Two hours seems reasonable. I’ll block out the time for it.”

What causes the unrealistic push to lower time estimates?

A belief that this will draw people in. However, the people you draw in are impatient and unrealistic. They are unlikely to be real customers.
A failure to see the complexity of what is described. The vendor has internalized the complexity of the system he sells.

Tagged #technical-writing, #communication, #product-management, #psychology, #estimates.

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Don’t say ‘it will take five minutes’

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