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.

Three reasons I wish I went to the Tech Crunch party:

Wow. Those are the same as my reasons to regret missing my high school prom.

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).

Yes, sometimes things can be too simple. But why?

I’m reading Ready for Anything by Getting Things Done author David Allen. Allen has a good point about how too simple can go wrong:

To-do “lists haven’t worked because they were an attempt to compress very different and discrete functions into one event and context. If you try to make something too simple, it will make everything seem more complex and difficult. Yes, we’ve all been up against the wall of too many things screaming at us in our head, and we’ve gotten temporary relief by ‘making a list.’ But these Band-Aids don’t work as an ongoing strategy.”

Recently Noah Kagan inspired some good discussion about the return on time. A few of us posted tips in the comments. Stuff I try tends to be time compression tricks, such as the Power Hour and the four day week.

But those are tricks. And tricks tend not to work forever. Just like the to-do list provides only temporary relief.

So far, Ready for Anything seems a little more accessible than Getting Things Done, perhaps because it’s in list form (subtitle: “52 productivity principles for work & life”). Hopefully I’ll find not just useful tricks, but something lasting that helps me discover what is important to me and how to accomplish it.

See also: Elliot’s personal prioritizing formula.

Back in the old days of the Web, I said something like “everyone should have a Web page.” It was part of my senior thesis on making it easy to publish. At the same time, I was actively poo-pooing blogs. What can I say, I’m a hypocrite.

Because it was the early Web, I don’t even have proof that I was so far ahead of my time, because I never wrote it down. While I understood the Web was a forum for self-expression, I didn’t go far enough with it. I thought it was a place to put your silly photologues or carefully crafted open letters.

The real new Web is quick, off-the-cuff self-expresion. That’s where real people exist.

Checking in on At the End of the Day, I read this rant (may contain bad grammar and the occasional curse word) from a 15-year-old Live Journal user. It made me smile, because I might finally get it.

For what it’s worth, I’m not usually one for cliches. It’s like there’s no there there, only on steroids.

After watching my nephews, I was stranded at the airport for an extra five hours Sunday night. There was plenty of actual work I could have done, but instead I decided to pound out this site:

At The End Of The Day - Cream of the cliche crop

This grabs items from Yahoo! News and Google Blogsearch that contain the cliched phrase “at the end of the day.” That’s it. There really isn’t any there here. But it was fun and it makes me giggle. And here’s an easy way to show up on ATEOTD… put the phrase in a blog post!

According to a tool I use to track my domain ideas, I first looked up ateotd.com on June 8. I did it again on July 23. I registered the domain July 25. And now I’m announcing it August 8. I’m agile, baby!

And the project was truly bootstrapped. Funded soley by the $6 food voucher from Alaska Airlines (sandwiches cost $9), I worked quickly, releasing early and often.

There’s room for other cliches on ATEOTD. Some of them I’ve used in this post. If you have favorites, write them in the comments and you may see it added, because at the end of the day, it’s other people’s ideas that I value most.

I have been eagerly awaiting one set of slides from Webvisions and now they’re available: Rashmi Sinha’s Designing for Social Sharing. Her talk was referenced in three other sessions that I attended, so this is thought-leader kind of stuff.

Unlike many sets of conference slides, these are easy to read (like last year’s How to make a zillion dollars and not lose your soul) without attending the talk. Her talk had so many wonderful things, it’s hard to digest them at once. I’ll probably have to revisit these slides several times.

Here’s a sneak peak of some of it…

Why is now the time for social sharing?
1. The Web has become a social sphere. There is over 50% broadband penetration in the U.S., and 65% of people use the Internet to maintain friendships.
2. Massively multi-player online games. You’re playing and interacting.
3. Rich interfaces enable richer interactions. Sites can provide a stream of real-time content, as opposed to a snapshot of some prior moment.

Some principles for social sharing
(including some of my social website rules)
1. Make system personally useful
2. Identify symbiotic relationship between personal and social
3. Create porous boundary between public and private
4. Allow for levels of participation
5. Let people feel the presence of others
6. But design for moments of independence

To find out details on any of these points, or see other great stuff I’ve left out, check out her slides.

Lately I’ve noticed something eerie as I go to type in the home URL of some of my favorite sites. My browser’s history, which goes back nine days, does not remember the home page. As we trend away from home page supremacy, global navigation becomes all the more important.

Derek Powazek has a three point plan for planning the most crucial element of your user interface:

1. Never, ever link to the page you’re on
2. Show where you are
3. Think before you link

Searching and other content filters (like RSS) are only going to become more prevalent. We can’t count on visitors streaming in our front door. We have to be ready for them climbing in the windows, or walking up from the basement.