The TL;DR:
- Respecting people’s time is key to behavior change
- We’ve baked brevity into our design—and our culture
- Every second of content should deliver value
- Here are the ways we weave this concept into our business
We’ve sat through some painful security awareness training in our day. You know, the perma-sessions with cheesy clip-art visuals and utterly outdated content that you’ll forget as soon as you click “finish.” At former companies, these training sessions were excruciating…but also motivating. We started Fable with a promise to do things differently: not only to be effective, but to respect people’s time.
That’s why brevity is one of our core design principles. We don’t just aim for relevance or personalization. We aim for crispness—not just for crispness’s sake, but because there’s too much at stake in security. The more we talk or write, the greater the chance our message will be diluted—and ignored. Our customers can’t afford that.
Their employees are busy. Multi-tasking. Distracted. They’re used to Tik Tok, Reels, and memes. They don’t have time to read a tome—no matter how riveting security is (well, we think it’s riveting).
When we build human risk interventions in the Fable platform like nudges, video briefings, two-way chats, and workflows, our goal is to deliver the maximum impact in the minimum time. Every second matters, and every word needs to have utility. It’s why we never ship a video over two minutes, and why we advise our customers to do the same when we hand over the keys to do customization on their own.
“[Fable content] makes the medicine go down a little bit easier. It matches the modern TikTok or Reels experience that people are used to today. And I think it feels like we’re on their side, like, “Hey, we’re trying to do something good for you and it’s not punitive.” In the past, you were told you have training to complete and it was going to be one, two, three hours long. It felt like you were being assigned work.”
—Jonathan Chow, CISO, Genesys
Over time, this belief in brevity has become about more than just design—it’s cultural. We’ve come to think of every word, every pixel, every second of interaction as a moment to earn trust and deliver value. If it doesn’t help, clarify, or move someone forward, it needs to go.
This obsession has reshaped how we work. Our videos are always under two minutes. Marketing emails fewer than 50 words. Blogs shipped with a TL;DR. Webinars capped at 15 minutes. Documentation clear and to the point. Even our website messages are designed to give you precisely what you need, and nothing more. Because respecting your time isn’t just good UX—it’s good business.
See what we mean with a demo (we promise not to waste your time!).
