Simplicity Rules

I realized that I referenced this book in talking about Nintendo in third place, but didn’t write about it. The Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout isn’t just a flashy business book. It explains the world around us, much like Darwin’s Origin of Species did years ago.

It’s a short little thing and it’s spot-on if you can forgive that it was written in 1994 (it praises Lotus Notes as a market leader). A couple years ago, Eric Sink wrote a Cliff’s Notes version aimed at small software companies.

I could read from beginning to end, then return to the beginning and still get something new out of it. The Laws have helped me understand why decisions get made and, at times, why a decision doesn’t work.

Reemer points me to a New Yorker piece on Nintendo, In Praise of Third Place.

The XBox and Playstation are going head-to-head to own the living room. Nintendo decided to focus on simple, fun gaming systems. The handheld DS (a next generation Gameboy) is popular with kids and commuters. Recently they released a small console with innovative controls with motion sensors, letting users interface with games in already familiar ways.

Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely. Some pundits are now speculating, ironically, that the simplicity of the Wii may make it a huge hit.

The Immutable Laws of Marketing wouldn’t say Nintendo is in third place. Instead, the company created a new category where they could be number one.

Last night I went to Portland State University to hear Cory Doctorow talk about copyright. He has released several books under the Creative Commons license and considers himself a “copyright practitioner.”

Doctorow traced changes in technology over the years and how they affected copyright. He obviously has a grasp on where things are headed. The podcast of his talk (72 MB, 1:18) is worth a listen if you are a publisher, an aggregator, a re-mixer, or even a simple consumer of copyrighted material.

I received a piece of spam today that reminded me of my past.

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Back in the 90s, I ran a Bulletin Board System. People would dial up with their computer and connect to my computer. There were discussion groups, games, and file sharing. It was like an arcane Web site, but it only had one phone line.

Drawings made of standard letters and symbols, ASCII art, was a mainstay of the BBS culture. Even though it’s in a spam message peddling prescription drugs, there’s a tiny bit of me that’s proud to see Old School Art representing.

Is it possible to have one search box accomplish multiple goals? The obvious answer is yes, because that’s the way we’ve been using Google and Yahoo! for years.

I’m not so sure the multi-goal search box translates so well to normal sites. Heck, even the search engines divided their menu to search different things years go.

I’m skeptical about whether that would work on normal sites, too. Take my ol’ Wi-Fi in Portland site, WifiPDX. For the first couple years there was one way to search: by address. Recently I added a name search, because many people (myself included) were blindly typing non-addresses into the form.

Should I have split up the form? Included two forms?

I decided to use one form, assuming an address and only going to a name if I couldn’t geocode what the user entered. It’s a dead simple approach that returns unfriendly errors like this:

Worse, the solution doesn’t scale well. Say I wanted to add the ability to search for your nearest coffee shop, or bar. Or, what if I wanted to find a nearby hair salon with Wi-Fi that is open on a Sunday morning and has plentiful outlets?

Far-fetched? Sure. This is just a modest Wi-Fi site. Problems of this sort are real. Somebody is facing them and I’m not certain a single search box can fix them.

When Wired News asked me to look into what became my latest article, it wasn’t about simplicity. Or Web 2.0, for that matter. I suppose the simple theme isn’t incredibly apparent in the final result, but it was a big topic with the people I interviewed.

Take LucidEra, the main company I wrote about. In order to make their product work for their target market, they have to make it simple. Small companies can’t afford to be anything other than simple.

Go to Wired News to read the whole thing: The Business Side of Web 2.0

A non-Web Developer friend writes with this question:
Why do home pages of a web site have HOME buttons/link on them that just reload the page?

The basic answer is that the site uses a template, a generic page upon which all others are built. This is a very good thing. When a site has thousands of pages–or even ten–it becomes a chore to update each one with changes. In college my senior thesis was on templating and I’ve since written a couple articles about it (PHP’s Smarty and ASP.NET Master Pages). If you don’t have some sort of template system in place, you’re making too much work for yourself.

A common fallout of a template is that even the front page (assuming it runs off the same template) links to itself. This can be confusing. Derek Powazek takes it a step farther in an AListApart article and says to never, ever link to the page you’re on. That means for every piece of global navigation, make sure the page it links to doesn’t have that item linkable in the global navigation. That’s a lot of work, especially when some templating systems aren’t built to be dynamic.

One problem that crops up when people try to follow this rule is that sometimes global navigation isn’t available when I want it. In order to simplify their template-making, sometimes webmasters will make all pages in a section not link to that section in the global nav.

Say I click on a global link to “Farm Animals,” on the following page, Farm Animals would not be clickable. Then I dig deeper and click on “Horses.” On this, the third page, I am still unable to click on Farm Animals and return myself to the parent menu.

Finally, a worse problem in trying to obey the law of not linking a page to itself, is when templates get mixed up between sections. Though I’m in the Tractors section, something happened that leaves Tractors clickable, but the “Fruits and Vegetables” section is not. This is easy to do while moving content around a site or making quick updates.

All the trouble can be avoided by just using one master template. The downside is pages sometimes link to themselves, but the upside is fewer headaches. Indeed, AListApart links pages to themselves all over the place. I say don’t worry about it.

Greg Linden has a great run-down of a Google anecdote from Marissa Mayer:

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

Even in this day of broadband, fast matters.

My Portland Web Innovator buddies at Needmore Designs have released a simple new recipe site, Gone Raw. It debuted at the Innovator meeting last night and by this morning the lorem was gone.

Even if you aren’t into raw food, it’s a great spot for quick recipes. No cooking needed! From a developer standpoint, it’s a project to admire.

Recipe for a kickin’ project:

1. Start with something about which you are passionate
2. Narrow the feature-set
3. Get that first version out sooner than later

When you have a really simple app, it even makes it obvious what to add next.

Congrats, Ray and Kandace. Hummus and carrots anyone?