My homepage is cnn.com.
‘Why do I tell you this?’ you may ask. Well, when I was making the monumental decision to choose a news site as my homepage, I chose CNN because it shows the most information in the shortest amount of time. For example, in the 3 or so seconds it took me from loading up CNN to typing in my wordpress admin URL, I found out that Greece has approved an austerity deal, that there are many questions surrounding Whitney Houston’s death, and that last night was a big one for Adele. That’s three news stories in three seconds. Not bad.
But that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about something called the 3 second trial. Basically, my theory is that any user of the web takes an average of 3 seconds to decide whether or not to stay on a site or to move on. On CNN, for example, if a news story grabs your attention in those first 3 seconds, you go to that article. On Facebook, you go to your news feed, check if you have any notifications and/or messages, scroll down your news feed to see if anything interesting has happened, and then proceed on with life. At least, that’s what I do.
Here’s why I think the 3 second trial exists. As intensive users of the web, we visit an average of 20 to 25 unique websites a day. This, as you may imagine, is a lot of exposure. So as a result, whenever we visit a webpage, we automatically compare it with any webpages we’ve been to previously. This makes us extremely critical in what we choose to look at on the web. As a result, people have to work harder to make sure webpages, and the overall quality of the web is improved. So the 3 second trial is actually pretty important to the internet.
Now, before I go, here’s just one last thought. The 3 second trial is entirely subconscious. In fact, when you first got to my blog, you probably read the title of this post and then subconsciously went through the 3 second trial to decide whether you wanted to read it. And if you got this far, chances are your subconscious approved 🙂
33 down, 333 to go
332 days remaining
Abzonnian Ramblings 