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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Tue 19 May 2020, 02:16 PM
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When creating videos and demos and blog posts, I always have to ask myself how long is long enough and how long is too long. But the question turns out to be a trick, because there are no unladen users. Everybody is too busy, too distracted, and too absorbed with their own issues. Unladen means not carrying a load. If you only focus on users who are not carrying a load, you are focusing on nobody at all.
 
Having said that, people probably do have a need for your software or services or whatever. Year after year, people buy our software, so we're clearly not only focused on the unladen. The difficulty then is knowing what load they are carrying, and how your software or services or whatever can lighten that load, or make it more productive or profitable.
 
So, while I strongly believe in brevity and most of my videos are 3 minutes or shorter, the real question: how you can get and keep the attention of a laden user? Clickbait headlines and dimmicks are good for getting attention, and lousy for keeping it. Information dense articles and videos are good for the thoroughly engaged, and lousy at engaging. Storytelling is fairly effective, but your story has to hit the mark quite closely, as distracted users often won't extrapolate to their own issues if the one being solved is not very, very close to a match.
 
Do you have ways you get and keep attention? If you do, how long do you assume the attention span will hold out? Obviously, the more your offering is exactly what people will need, the more likely they are to stay around to hear the pitch, but what do you do when they don't recognize that it is exactly what they need?

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