21 Clicks Is Too Much – Stop the Demo!

Yes, people do count clicks during demos – and this is the true, brief horror story of too many clicks (I heard this from a recent Great Demo! Workshop participant): 

During a demo – and not very far into it, the head of a group of National Account Managers suddenly said, “Stop the demo – 21 clicks is too much!”  And that was the end of that sales opportunity…

His point was very simple:  any task that takes 21 clicks to complete is probably going to be too difficult and too complicated to do for the average person (and in this particular case the audience and expected users were sales people…).  For this senior manager, 21 clicks was (beyond) his threshold for an acceptable number of steps for this particular task. 

 

The moral? 

Take that path that is the fewest number of steps to complete the task.