Simplicity Rules

Are you building a Web product? Add the obvious features first.

Let me backpeddle a moment. The most important thing is to get together a first version. Make it have your core features.

Next you may want to add in those pieces from your grand vision. You’ll get there, but I think you should first look for obvious things that are missing. Don’t let yourself regret it later.

TypePad has been out for three years. I have never been a user, but I read what their users write all the time. Often I return to a TypePad blog and want to find a post. Is there really no search in TypePad? That’s an example of an obvious feature. I’m sure the folks at Six Apart (who make TypePad) could even find a search partner willing to give a little revenue share for sending searches their way.

Finding the difference between your core features and frill features is tough. It makes you question how well you understand what your full-grown ideas will look like as embryos.

By contrast, the obvious stuff should be easy. It’s the stuff your gut tells you that you should be doing. If you put it off, make sure you justify it. Then do everything you can to get back to it soon. Your product will be better for it.

In the vein of Steal This Idea come a couple of sites that actually executed.

One, BuildV1 wants to connect like-minded people to work on projects together. Maybe at first they would build something simple together. Once they know each other, maybe they will work on something bigger.

Rather than focusing on ideas, BuildV1 separates the site into two lists: entrepreneurs who need help and people who want to help entrepreneurs.

By contrast to that laissez faire approach, Cambrian House is about giving ideas to crowds and letting them run with it… or tear it apart. If an idea makes it past the first round (called “Idea Warz”), then people get together and make it. Finally, Cambria House markets the product, paying out profits to the idea guy and the others that helped make it. This animation explains it pretty well.

Cambrian House values ideas at five to ten percent of the whole project. That might be high, but I like seeing it in terms of a percentage instead of the idea multiplier.

Thanks to Amit for showing me BuildV1 and Ryan for pointing me toward Cambria House.

Today I was logging into my bank account. I was so pleased when it auto-selected the username field. There are almost no occasions that I go to the site and don’t login to my account.

This reminded me of the first time I saw Google. It was somewhere in 1999. Paul DeStefano walked into the WITS Help Desk and showed it to me. He really liked the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. I remember being wowed by getting the United Airlines site when I typed in their name. That shows how bad search was in 1999.

What impressed me most was a very simple bit of Javascript. When the sparse page loaded, the search box was auto-selected. Duh!

It wasn’t new technology, but it also wasn’t being used much. Perhaps developers were worried about users disabling Javascript or worse getting Javascript errors. Google pushed forward anyway, probably understanding their techie early adopters. Paul, for example, used to try to save old data off of floppies for fun.

Google led the way by using this little Javascript snippet. Thankfully, my bank followed. Google has continued, leading the Ajax revolution, producing more responsive interfaces (think GMail, Google Maps). To me, it all goes back to 1999, when Paul convinced me to take a moment’s break from tech support.

I am so proud of Jenny’s Seven reasons why I hate MySpace. I especially like this one:

Becase it’s teaching the next generation to treat the web like a junk heap of useless repeating videos and not a useful tool

It’s a nice (and accidental) rebuttal to my recent acceptance of the real new Web.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s always nice to have some textual context. And it helps if the picture is something more than an endless animated GIF (I edited this one to only loop five times–not that it makes it any better).

But I think of ringtones and how my friend Jon once compared them to teenage scribblings on Pee Chee folders. MySpace profiles are even closer, except they’re trackable, yet easily changeable, a dynamic with both advantages and disadvantages.

I’m not sure there’s a solution to the junk heap problem. I’m not sure if we even need a solution, especially since the kids after the MySpace generation seem to be some enterprising ones.

(Still want to see that kid loop continuously? Click here).