Recently I researched Calendly1, a scheduling tool similar to Google’s Appointment Slots2.
When I signed up for the service, they provided me with two options:
- Watch really short new user video
- Skip it
Usually, I ignore onboarding videos because they tend to be tedious and, many times, not as helpful as just playing around with an application. These options anticipated that skipping behavior, along with a nod towards being respectful of my time.
It turns out that the video wasn’t too short: 4 minutes. That’s not an eternity, but when the app said “really short,” I was expecting 2 minutes or less. Either way, they chose not to put the total time of the video on the player, which was interesting to me. I could only see how far I’d gone, meaning I had to estimate how much further I had to go. Not showing the user the total length of a video is an interesting decision, and I would guess that it increases the number of viewers who watch all of the way through. That’s conjecture, of course, but the devil is in the details and it seems that Calendly is paying attention.
1. You can check out Calendly on their website.2. You can read more about Gmail’s Appointment Slots on the Official Gmail Blog.
