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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