Much of our lives is structured around time. When we think about time, we often think about events or schedules. When does something happen? Time provides structure for experience.
In our lives online, content shapes our experience. How then can time bring structure to content we consume online?
Content strategists generally think about structuring content in terms of sequences, or logical arrangement. I’d like to introduce another way to think about structuring content: in terms of time. But instead of focusing on timing — when something happens — we can focus on how much time something requires. The focus on the dimension of duration has developed into a discipline known as timeboxing.
Timeboxing and Content
Timeboxing is a concept used in agile planning and delivery. Despite its geeky name, all of us use timeboxes everyday, even if we don’t use the term. We schedule 15 minute conversations, or half-hour meetings, and then decide what’s the most important material to cover in that block of time, and what material needs to wait to be dealt with elsewhere. Despite our best wishes, circumstances commonly dictate our available time to discuss or consider an issue, rather than the reverse.
With roots in project management, timeboxing is most often applied to the production of content, rather than its consumption. But timeboxing can be used for any kind of task or issue.
“Timeboxing allocates a fixed time period, called a timebox, within which planned activity takes place”
Wikipedia
The consumption of content can also be timeboxed. Content that is consumed on a schedule is often timeboxed. Some examples of timeboxing content experience include:
- The BBC offers a “Prayer for the day” lasting two minutes
- Many broadcasters offer timed 15 or 30 second updates on markets, weather and traffic
- The PechaKucha format for presentations of 20 slides for 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds, to maximize the number of speakers and keep presentations interesting
- Time-limited conversations in “speed networking” in order to maximize the number of conversations had
Producers (those who offer content) decide how much content to make available in order to synchronize when it can be consumed. There’s a close association between fixing the duration of content, and scheduling it at a fixed time. The timing of content availability to users can help to timebox it.
Limits without schedules
But timeboxing doesn’t require having a schedule. In an agile methods context, timeboxing inverts the customary process of planning around a schedule. Instead of deciding when to do something, and then figuring out how long can be allotted to a task, the timeboxing approach first considers how long a task requires, and then schedules it based on when it can be addressed. How long something takes to express is many cases more important than when something happens.
This is a radical idea. For many people, timeboxing — limiting the time allowed for content — is not our natural tendency. Many of us don’t like restricting what we can say, or how long we can talk about something.
Timeboxing tends to happen when there’s a master schedule that must be followed. But when access to content doesn’t depend on a schedule, timeboxing is ignored. Even audio content loses the discipline of having a fixed duration when it is delivered asynchronously. A weekly podcast will often vary considerably in length, because it is not anchored to a schedule forcing it to fit in a slot that is followed by another slot.
Authors, concerned about guarding their independence, often resist imposing limits on how much they can say. Their yardstick seems to be: the duration of the content should match whatever they as authors think is necessary to convey a message. The author decides the appropriate duration — not an editor, a schedule, or the audience.
Without question, the web liberates content producers from the fixed timetable of broadcast media. The delivery of digital content doesn’t have to follow a fixed schedule, so the duration of content doesn’t have to be fixed either. The web transcends the past tyranny of physical limitations. Content can be consumed anytime. Online content has none of the limits on space, or duration, that physical media imposed.
Schedules can be thought of as contracts. The issue is not only whether or not the availability of content follows a schedule, but who decides that schedule.
Online content doesn’t need to be available according to a set schedule, unlike broadcasters who indicate that you can listen to certain content at 9 am each day.
A schedule may seem like tyranny, forcing authors to conform to artificial limitations about duration, and restricting audiences to content of a limited duration. But schedules have hidden benefits.
Setting expectations for audiences
When content follows a schedule, and imposes a duration, the audience knows what to expect. They tacitly accept the duration they are willing to commit to the content. They know ahead of time what that commitment will be, and decided it is worth doing.
The more important question is how consumers of content can benefit from timeboxing, not how producers of content can benefit. Timeboxing content can measure the value of content in terms of the scarcest commodity audiences have: their time.
How should one measure the time it takes to consume content? A simple standard would be listening duration: the amount of time it would take for the content to be read aloud to you in a normal speaking pace.
We read faster than we talk. We are used to hearing words more slowly than we would read them. If we are a “typical” person, we read 250 words/minute. We speak and listen at 150 words/minute.
Listening can’t be sped-up, unlike reading. And having to have something repeated is annoying for a listener. For content presented on a screen, there is generally no physical limits to how much content can be displayed. Content creators rely on the audience’s ability to scan the content, and to backtrack, to locate and process information of interest to them. Content read aloud doesn’t offer that freedom. Listening duration provides a more honest measurement of how long content takes to consume.
The duration of content is important for three reasons. It influences:
- The commitment audiences will make to trying out the content
- The attention they may be able to offer the content
- The interest they find the content offers
Audience commitments
Most of us have seen websites that provide a “time to read” indicator. Videos and podcasts also indicate how many minutes the content lasts. These signals help audiences choose content that matches their needs — do they have enough time now, or do they wait until later? This is content the right level of detail, or it is too detailed?
Content varies widely in length and the amount of time required to consume it. One-size does not fit all content. Imagine if publishers made more of an effort to standardize the length of their content, so that specific content types were associated with a specific length of time to read or listen.
Timeboxing recognizes that tasks should fit time allotments. Timeboxing can encourage content designers to consider the amount of time they expect audiences will give to the content.
Audiences have limited time to consume content. That means they can’t commit to looking or listening to content unless it fits their situation.
And when they consume content, they have limited attention to offer any specific message.
Audience attention
Currently, some publishers provide authors with guidelines about how many words or characters to use for different content elements. Most often, these guidelines are driven by the internal needs of the publisher, rather than being led by audience needs. For example, error messages may be restricted to a certain size, because they need to fit within the boundaries of a certain screen. The field for a title can only be of a certain length, as that’s what is specified in the database. These limits do control some verbosity. But they aren’t specifically designed around how long it would take audiences to read the message. And limiting characters or words by itself doesn’t mean the content will receive attention from audiences.
Time-to-read is difficult to calculate. Instead of counting words or characters, publishers try to guess the time those words and characters consume. That is not a simple calculation, since it will partly depend on the familiarity of the content, and how easily it can be processed by audiences. Tight prose may be harder comprehend, even if it is shorter.
Since much text is accompanied by visuals, the number of words on a screen may not be a reliable indication of how long it takes to consume the content. Apple notes:
“Remember that people may perform your app’s actions from their HomePod, using ‘Hey Siri’ with their AirPods, or through CarPlay without looking at a screen. In these cases, the voice response should convey the same key information that the visual elements display to ensure that people can get what they need no matter how they interact with Siri.”
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
The value of structuring content by length of time, rather than number of characters or words, is easiest to appreciate when it comes to voice interaction. Voice user interfaces rely on a series of questions and answers, each of which needs to be short enough to maintain the attention of both the user and the bot processing the questions. Both people and bots have limited buffers to hold inbound information. The voice bot may always be listening for a hot word that wakes it up — so that it really starts to pay attention to what’s being said. Conversely, the user may be listening to their home speaker’s content in a distracted, half-hearted way, until they hear a specific word or voice that triggers their attention.
Matching the audience’s capacity to absorb information
Attention is closely related to retention. Long, unfamiliar content is hard to remember. Many people know about a famous study done in the 1950s by a Professor Miller about the “magical number seven” relating to memory spans. The study was path breaking because it focused on how well people can remember “contents”, and proposed creating chunks of content to help people remember. It is likely the beginning of all discussion of about chunks of content. Discussing this study, Wikipedia notes: a memory “span is lower for long words than it is for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud.” The famous Miller experiment introduced time (duration) as a factor in retention. It is easier to recall shorter duration content than longer duration.
We can extend this insight when considering how different units of content can influence audiences in other ways, beyond what they remember. Duration influences what audiences understand, what they find useful, and what they find interesting.
Exceeding the expected time is impolite. When audience believe content takes “too long” to get through, they are annoyed, and will often stop paying attention. They may even abandon the content altogether.
The amount of attention people are willing to give to content will vary with the content type. For example, few people want to read long entries in a dictionary, much less listen to a definition read aloud.
Some content creators use timeboxing as their core approach, as is evident in the titles of many articles, books and apps. For example, we see books promising that we can “Master the Science of Machine Learning in Just 15 Minutes a Day.” Even when such promises may seem unrealistic, they feel appealing. As readers, we want to tell publishers how much time we are able and willing to offer.
The publisher should work around our time needs, and deliver the optimal package of material that can be understood in a given amount of time. It doesn’t help us to know the book on machine learning is less than 100 pages, if we can’t be sure how difficult the material is to grasp. The number of pages, words, and characters, is an imperfect guide to how much time is involved.
Audience interest
Another facet of structuring content by time is that it signals the level of complexity, which is an important factor in how interesting audiences will find the content. If a book promises to explain machine learning in 15 minutes a day, that may sound more interesting to a reader without an engineering background than a book entitled “The Definitive Guide to Machine Learning” which sounds both complicated and long.
What is the ideal length of a content type, from an audience perspective? How long would people want to listen to (or read attentively) different content types, if they had a choice? For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the audience is only moderately motivated. They would like to stop as soon as their need for information is satisfied.
Time-delimited content types can offer two benefits to audiences:
- Pithiness
- Predictable regularity
Content types define what information to include, but they don’t necessarily indicate how much information to include. The level of detail is left to individual authors, who may have different standards of completeness.
When content becomes bloated, people stop paying attention. There’s more information than they wanted.
Making content more even
Another problem is when content is “lumpy”: some content relating to a certain purpose is long-winded, while other content is short. A glossary has short definitions for some words but other definitions are several paragraphs. We find this phenomenon in different places. On the same website, people move between short web pages that say very little and long pages that scroll forever.
Paradoxically, the process of structuring content into discrete independent units can have the effect of creating units of uneven duration. The topic gets logically carved up. But the content wasn’t planned for consistency in length. Each element of content is independent, and acts differently, requiring more or less time to read or hear.
Audiences may give up if they encounter a long explanation when they were expecting a short one. It only takes one or two explanations that are abnormally long for audiences to lose confidence in what to expect. A predictable experience is broken.
Timeboxing content messages encourages content designers to squeeze in as much impact in the shortest possible time.
Message units, according to duration
If people have limited free time, have limited attention to offer, and have lukewarm interest, the content needs to be short — often shorter than one might like to create.
We can thus think about content duration in terms of “stretch goals” for different types of content. Many people will be happy if the content offered can be successful communicating a message while sticking to these durations.
While no absolute guidelines can be given for how long different content should be, it is nonetheless useful to make some educated guesses, and see how reliable they are. We can divide durations into chunks that increase by multiples of three, to give different duration levels. We can then consider what kinds of information can reasonably be conveyed within such a duration.
- 3-5 seconds: Concisely answer “What is?” or “Who is?” with a brief definition or analogy (“Jaws in outer space”)
- 10-15 seconds: Provide a short answer or tip, make a suggestion, provide a short list of options.
- 30 seconds: Suggest a new idea, explain a concept, offer an “elevator pitch”
- 1-3 minutes: To discuss several things, explain the context or progression of something — an episode or explainer
For writers accustomed to thinking about the number of words, thinking how long it would take to listen to a message involves a shift. Yet messages must match an expected pattern. Their duration is a function of how much new material is being introduced.
Creating messaged based on their duration helps to counterbalance a desire for completeness. Messages don’t have to be complete. They do have to be heard, and understood. There’s always the opportunity for follow up. And while less common, if a message is too short, it is also disappointing.
Testing the duration
For short chunks of content addressing routine purposes, content designers should craft their messages to be appealing to the distracted content consumer. They can ask:
- How easy is the message to follow when read aloud?
- Does the message stand on its own, without exhausting the audience?
- Can people ask a question, and get back an answer that matches how much time they are willing and able to offer?
I expect that the growing body of research relating to voice user interaction (VUI) will add to our understanding of the role of duration in content structure. Feel free to reach out to me on social or community channels if you’d like to share experience or research relating to this theme. It’s an evolving area that deserves more discussion.
— Michael Andrews