Simplicity Rules

If you want lots of people to buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or just visit your blog, get rid of anything in their way. Unfortunately, I think a lot of accidental obstructions remain in processes because its creators and implementers fail to critically consider each barrier.

Example of the moment: Yahoo! Publisher Network requires tax and payment information before they’ll let you have ad code to put on your site. For me, this meant closing the window. I was ready to publish some of their ads, giving them money and their advertisers traffic.

By contrast, Google’s AdSense product only requires you to put in tax and payment information when they’re ready to pay you. And what a motivator I imagine that is, knowing they’re ready to send you a check. And what’s the worst that can happen if a publisher never fills out the tax and payment information? Google keeps the money.

Since Yahoo! is working on creating a higher-quality network, it is possible that this barrier is intentional. Could it be that by requiring tax information, Yahoo! gets more dedicated publishers? Maybe.

If that is the case, at least the obstacle has been considered and purposely left in place. At least they critically considered the barrier.

Feel free to share your own examples–I don’t require you to register to leave a comment.

Update: Yes, I realize YPN is a beta program. Consider this feedback. 🙂

Markus Frind, who runs a successful dating site, is usually pretty contrarian. So, it’s no surprise to see he says most social networks will fail.

I’m not sure I agree with all his data, but I do agree with his sentiment, with a qualifier. If “social network” is defined as a site that exists purely as a collection of friends and contacts. Think MySpace and Friendster, a place where there is nothing to do beyond socialize. Places that break my first rule of social Web sites will have a hard time sticking around.

The market for social sites that do something beyond connect people is virtually unlimited. Give me a reason to go to your site and then let me share the experience with others. We may be seeing the end of social networks, but it’s just the beginning of social Web sites.

Webvisions has come and gone. There were plenty of organization things that could have made the conference better, but I’ll save it for the survey. Overall, I think it was pretty good. One way to tell is that I missed an awesome session by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging platform. How did I miss it? I was in another awesome session.

Luckily, Micki Krimmel took some good notes. The session was titled, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users,” but a friend of mine who attended said it wasn’t really about scaling, but making a product for a user. Matt has twelve rules on making a Web product and Micki wrote them all down.

Here are my three favorites:

• Get out 1.0 as fast as humanly possible. This goes hand-in-hand with bootstrapping. Get something done, make it public, and tweak from there.
• Measure your success – you have to have metrics. Everything that is watched improves.
• Know what to do if you are successful — dog chasing a car doesn’t know what to do if he catches it.

I really like Portland coffee shops, with their independent style and community feel. And, of course, I like the Web done right. But both are often done wrong and it’s a shame since it takes so little to do it right.

Noah Kagan says a shop in San Fran does so many things right. Similarly, my old office had a good little spot I called Mike’s, because the owner was that friendly. What’s interesting to me is the things that make a coffee shop successful (after location, perhaps) are really easy. All you have to do is remember that your customers are people.

This approach works on the Web, too. The visitors are people. To create a place where visitors return, you need to give a positive experience. And it probably only takes a little more effort.