Consumer products and the ninety-second rule

My friend Hema's daughter is seven and has the attention of an unsupervised wasp. She gets a new app on her grandparents' iPad, opens it, and you have approximately as long as it takes a kettle to boil before she decides whether the app is good. If the answer is no, the app is closed and she's onto something else. The iPad does not get a second chance. The app does not get a second chance. I do not get a second chance, even though I'm the one who suggested it.

I spent a weekend at Hema's house in March and accidentally watched her daughter test thirty consumer products in two days. I was not running an experiment. I was, depending on the moment, making lunch or refereeing a fight about who got the orange marker. But I was watching. I watched a tween reading app fail because the first screen was a permission dialog. I watched a journaling app for kids succeed because the first thing it did was draw a little house and ask her to color it.

Both apps had the same business model. Both had the same approximate level of polish. The first one had spent, I'm guessing, six figures on its splash screen. The second one had a tutorial that was three seconds long. The second one won.

Consumer products live or die in the first ninety seconds. That sentence is not original to me. It's a thing people say in design talks. But I had not, until that weekend, really felt how literal it is.

What the ninety seconds are for

Three things, in order. The user has to understand what the app does, why it's for them, and what the first satisfying action is. If you fail any of them, the app closes.

Adults are slightly more patient than a seven-year-old. Adults will give you maybe two minutes. But the structure is the same. The first screen is the hero. The first interaction is the proof. The first reward — the dopamine, the little moment of oh, that worked — is the thing that buys you the rest of the session.

Most consumer products get the first screen right and the rest wrong. They have a beautiful onboarding splash. Then they ask for permissions. Then they ask you to make an account. Then they ask you to invite three friends. By the time you get to the actual product, you have been asked four questions and given nothing in return. The seven-year-old closes the app.

The pattern that works

1. Show. Don't promise.

The journaling app for kids did not say "draw your favorite house!" on a screen with a button. It showed a half-drawn house, and a soft animation of a crayon finishing one line. The crayon stopped near the door. There was an obvious next move. There was no button.

This is the most underrated move in consumer-product design. The product should begin before the user agrees to begin. Permission dialogs, account creation, friend invites — all of that should happen after the user has felt the thing.

2. Make the first action ridiculously easy

Seven-year-old. Crayon. Door. Whole house. Two seconds. The first action in a great consumer product is something the user can complete without thinking. Not without effort — effort is fine — but without deciding. Decisions are expensive. The first one should be free.

I've been making mood boards for consumer-products clients for years, and the single most common note I leave is: delete the first dialog. Just start. Almost nobody takes the note the first time. About a third take it the second. The ones that ship the change always see better activation metrics. Always.

3. Reward the first action visibly

When the kid finished coloring the house, a small confetti animation played and the house got a sign that said her name. She had been in the app for thirty seconds. She had drawn one thing. She had been rewarded with a small piece of personal property.

She kept the app open for forty-five minutes. Her grandmother had to tell her to stop, twice.

What this means for the consumer product you're building

It probably means your splash screen is too long. It probably means your onboarding has too many steps. It probably means the first thing you ask the user is a permission, when it should be a coloring page.

The trap is that consumer products are usually shipped by teams whose internal culture is built around — and here I am going to be uncharitable — making sure nothing goes wrong. The legal team wants the permission up front. The growth team wants the email captured up front. The design team wants the brand intro up front. Everyone gets a slot, and the user gets a wall.

The way to fix this is to make one person at the company responsible for the first ninety seconds, and to give that person veto power over what appears in them. Not influence. Veto. If the legal team wants a permission in the first ninety seconds, the ninety-seconds owner gets to say no. The legal team can get its permission at second ninety-one.

I have watched two consumer-product companies do this. Both saw activation numbers move by between thirty and seventy percent. Neither company stopped collecting the permissions or the emails. They just collected them later, in moments when the user already wanted to give them up.

The launch video, again

If you are shipping a consumer product, your launch video is also a ninety-second product. Watch the launch videos that worked. The Notion AI debut. The Arc browser intro. The Granola pitch video. None of them are over two minutes. All of them show, in the first fifteen seconds, the satisfying action — the highlight in Notion, the new tab in Arc, the auto-summary in Granola — and then earn the rest of your attention by paying off the promise.

Bad consumer launch videos do the opposite. They open with a montage. They establish the brand. They explain the vision. They get to the product at second forty-five. The seven-year-old, metaphorical or otherwise, has already closed the tab.

If you'd like the curated wall, the launches collection is the place. The /for/launch-videos page is the same wall framed for people specifically studying the form. Both work. Same content. Different doorway.

An aside: the agency angle

I do a fair amount of work with a software agency in Berlin that ships consumer products for European brands. Their secret — and they will tell anyone who asks — is that they spend the first sprint of every project on the first ninety seconds. Not the product. Not the homepage. The first ninety seconds of the user experience. The unboxing.

Their founder, a tall man named Stefan who used to make documentary films, told me once that consumer products are unboxing experiences that happen to keep going. "You are always unboxing," he said. "Every screen is a small unboxing. The first one is the loudest."

If you run a dev agency or a software agency that does any consumer-products work, this is the most underused billable hour in your business. Charge for the first ninety seconds separately. Make it its own deliverable. Most clients have never been asked to think about it as a thing on its own. When they do, they almost always get better.

How to audit your own ninety seconds

1. 01Open your app cold, as a new user. Time it. From the first tap to the first satisfying action — the first moment of oh, that worked — is your ninety seconds. Most apps clock in at two and a half to four minutes. The good ones are under forty seconds.
2. 02Count the questions. How many things did the app ask you before it gave you anything? Permissions, accounts, names, preferences. The number is almost always higher than the team thinks.
3. 03Find the satisfying action. What's the moment a user thinks this app is for me? If your product doesn't have one, the rest of the ninety seconds doesn't matter. You're building a tool. Make it a tool worth picking up.
4. 04Cut everything between the open and the satisfying action. Everything. Move it later. Move it to a settings menu. Move it to a card that appears after the third use. Just get it out of the first ninety.

Hema's daughter, last seen

Hema's daughter still uses the journaling app. Eight months later. She uses it more than she uses television. She has, by my count, drawn nineteen houses and given each one a name. The newest house is purple. She told me, when I asked her what was inside it, that it was "a place where you can stop drawing."

I thought about that for a long time. I think it's the smartest thing I've ever heard a consumer product described as: a place where you can stop. The app does not pull her back in. She returns because she wants to. The ninety seconds bought her the year.

That is what consumer-product design is, when it's done well.