2 minutes rule: a Service Design term definition

Video transcript

What is the “2 seconds rule”?

The guys at usuability.gov define it like this.

“A generally acceptable amount of time for a user to wait for certain system responses such as an application launch or switch.”

That’s it

Why should you care?

So, why should you care about the 2-second rule? Because this is not just a good rule of thumb to make customers happy, but also something that can have huge implications for your business.

Amazon, for example, says that if their pages would load in just one second more, they could lose up to $1.6 billion in sales each year. And here it wasn’t two seconds! Just one!

The guys at Google did a similar study but this time they looked at the impact of slowing down their search results just by four-tenths of a second. Yeah, that’s basically nothing. And what did they found out? They could lose up to 8 million searches per day! And this would mean they would show many millions fewer online ads and therefore lose a shit load of money.

The two seconds rules says that making your users wait more than 2 seconds for something to load on their smartphone or laptop is too long! And research shows that making your users wait for just one more tiny second on your website, can make you lose a shit load of money.

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