Surface Ripples

“5-Minute Read”

Has anyone noticed that, nowadays, newsletters to which we subscribe or news articles contain at the top or as part of their heading “three minute read” or “five minute read“?

I’m not sure where this came from, but I would guess that it may be designed to assist recipients of such emails and articles to prioritise their reading by showing them how long it will take them to read that message. The only question I have is, “How did they calculate the time required to read?”

Common sense suggests that this would have been done by somebody reading the article and timing themselves doing so.  That’s a perfectly acceptable way of doing things but the problem I have is that one can’t take into account the reading speeds and abilities of every potential reader.

So the question becomes, “Is this an average figure for a representative group of readers or simply for the person who wrote the article?”

In our globalised world, different people read articles at different speeds for any number of reasons:

• The article is not in their first language.
• They may be dyslexic.
• They may naturally be “slow readers”

Although it seems a minor issue, one should take this into account.  There are certain newsletters to which I subscribe which I know are written by journalists whose first language is English and who have an extremely extensive vocabulary.  The consequence of this is that they use words with which not everyone will be as familiar as they.  When I see that an article written by a journalist for this particular newsletter will take “10 minutes”, I know that it’s likely to take longer simply for the “average” reader to absorb the contents, the nuances, and the information contained therein.

I do feel that stating that something is a “three-minute read” helps many.  Let’s go back to my example of the newsletter.  If I see articles that are “three minutes reads” and “eight minute reads”, I’ll probably prioritise the three minute articles over the eight minute ones as I know that, in a given amount of time, I can read more of the shorter than the longer articles.

The point as ever is metrics. We tend to use metrics that we ourselves understand but risk not making allowances for others.  This problem will never go away, but it is perhaps as well to understand, that different things mean different things to different people. And that we need to incorporate this in our dealings with others.

I’ve spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With a wealth of international experience in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to provide solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management.  I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email. My website  provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.  

Labels: Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Strategy

posted by William Martin @ 14:26