It's not just a hunch that attention has changed.
In 2004, UC Irvine professor Gloria Mark started tracking how long people stayed on one screen before switching to another. Back then it was two and a half minutes. By 2012, it was down to 75 seconds. Her most recent measurements put it at 47 seconds, and other researchers who ran the same test independently landed in the same range, between 40 and 50 seconds (Mark, *Attention Span*, 2023). Two decades in, and the average visitor gives a screen roughly a third of the time they used to.
Is your homepage written for the 2004 visitor?
In 2011, psychologist Daniel Kahneman published *Thinking, Fast and Slow*, describing two ways the brain makes decisions. System 1 is fast, automatic, and runs without effort: it's the part of you that flinches at a loud noise or reads a stop sign without "thinking" about it. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful: it's the part that does long division, or compares two pricing tables line by line. (The terms trace back to psychologist Keith Stanovich, whose dual-process research Kahneman built on and popularized.)
Nobody visits a homepage in cognitive mode. They scan and react, and only shift into slower, careful reading if System 1 doesn't find a reason to leave first.
That's a problem. We assumes that a visitor who has landed on the webpage is committed to reading carefully.
That visitor is rare like the white crow.
The visitor who has shown up is scanning for a handful of fast, wordless signals: does this look credible, does this look like it's for me, is there an obvious next step. That verdict happens in about two seconds, before a single feature gets read. If the page fails the gut check, System 2 never gets a vote. The visitor is already gone.
Two seconds sounds impossible to win. It isn't.
Feature image: AI replica of Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm (Musée Marmottan, Paris)