10 golden rules for building successful Web applications

10 golden rules for building successful Web applications

The speech from Fred Wilson at the annual meeting of the Web Future applications held in Miami in February 2010

Thank you, Qingyun, for recommending such a good speech.

Thank Zhuo and busy time to help me review, modify, put forward very good suggestions

Thank you, Lily, for helping me proofread, revise, and make very valuable comments after my first draft was completed.

Note: The original text in the English content of some errors, and video discrepancies, so according to the video. () The content is I for the convenience of understanding added, each title after the pictures are from the original PPT

Original and video address: Golden principles of Successful Web Apps

Speech ppt Address: Ppt:10 Golden principles of successful Web Apps

The following is the content of the speech:

Opening remarks:


Thank you, everyone, it's nice to be here in Miami. It was cold when I arrived from New York last night, and the ground was covered with snow, but now it is very warm and comfortable and very happy to be here.

Before the speech, carsonified someone suggested that I could list 10 rules for building a successful web application, and I thought: "Well, I don't know if I can control it." However, I have now listed it and intend to share it with you today. It all comes from my 15 years of experience in investing in Web applications, including what I've learned, what practices are effective and which practices are ineffective, and so on.

I've used a lot of web apps, and for us, the way we invest is very straightforward. Before investing we know what kind of application we are interested in, if we are not interested in the product, then we will directly tell the project leader this is not what we want, on the contrary, we will adopt this product. Then if we find that the product resonates with us then we will try to understand him. Once this product, and the corresponding service and project team are very attractive to us, then we will invest.

These 10 items are all I've been looking for in web apps. I'm sure some of you will disagree with me, but this is really essential for good web applications. So today's theme is: "Building 10 golden rules for successful web applications".

1. Speed

First of all, I believe speed is the most important, for a Web application, speed is the most important of all features. If your application is slow, people are not going to use it, which is more obvious than the advanced user in the mainstream user (average user). I think for advanced users, they sometimes understand the challenges and tribulations of building a very fast application, so when they face slow applications, maybe they can tolerate it. But as far as my wife and children are concerned, they are the mainstream user I think (general), and once a application is slow, they will not wait patiently, but give up immediately.

I think the web app must be fast, and if it's slow, the consequences are obvious. Each investment project of our company (venture capital company) is recorded on the Pingdom (website Performance Test Service site), we will go to see it every week. We find that whenever there is a problem with the application of the company's investment (performance problems, slow speed), these applications usually do not have a rapid development momentum. This really powerful evidence confirms the fact that "speed is superior to function, speed is the most important", for a Web application, speed is not an advantage, but a requirement.

2. Instant Utility

"Instant utility" means that services (in fact, Web applications, because most Web applications are service providers) are real time Help for you (simple, practical, and real-time). If you build a service, and then the user wants to use it, he has to spend one hours to complete the following process: Configure the service, start it, import contacts, do a lot of data-related things. I think most people will give up. Services must be instantly available to users, which many people ignore.

With a number of tips that will enable you to quickly get your application to this instant utility, take a more appropriate example: when you build an information service, you can start to crawl more popular information elsewhere on the web as your own service. But there is a point where you have to give users instant, helpful information.

Another example: When Google launched Google video about 4 and 5 years ago, YouTube also posted the same service almost at the same time. If you're uploading a video to Google, you get a message saying: "Your video will be played out in one weeks." Of course, such a way is obviously not very good. YouTube, in contrast, offers real-time online coding, and you can immediately see the video you're uploading. That's what I want to say about instant utility.

3. Software is the medium

I have a lot to say about that. My point is that today's software is the medium. In particular, consumer software, when people use your software, is like contacting various media. The media I am talking about here refer to traditional media such as magazines, news, TV programs, etc. For example, "The New York Times" and "The Wall Street Journal", "Flashy World" (a magazine) and "Fashion" (fashion magazine), Fox and CNN, each media has its own characteristics, there are different from other media unique attitude and perseverance.

Like the traditional media, I think the current software should also have their own personality characteristics, to send their own voice, to express their attitude. Some of the things that look like "Fail Whale" (the cue pattern of Twitter downtime) are "silly", but they are also personalized things. While it may be embarrassing for Twitter users to go down in the street, people still wear "Fail Whale" clothes, which proves at least one thing: the service has its own characteristics, it provides a medium to connect people with the same voice. That's what I want to say. This is important for Web applications.

4. Less is more

I have no doubt that "less is more", especially in the early days of your construction. Then you can slowly enhance the functionality of your site. Facebook, for example, now offers 20 to 30 different core functions in his service. But it was very easy to use when it was just starting out. I think that's what a good application must have.

The company's investment in delicious is one of my most satisfying investments. I like the simplicity of it, delicious, but very powerful. People use it five or 10 times a day, and they use it every day. These services, while very narrow in scope, are useful to users and are used at all times. They are very powerful and helpful to you, and at the same time I think they are very quick, simple and easy to use, and they provide you with a very good platform.

5. Programmable

For Web application developers, I don't think that's enough to say. But I think the key is very important. It is important to be able to make other applications based on your application in some way or to add other things to your application. This means opening the API, which in my view is a read-write API. Delicious's founder told me two or three years ago that if the API is not read-write, it is not an open API. This has formed a credo within our company. We think that if the API is just readable, it's no different from RSS.

Not all of our investment applications are open to the read and write APIs, but we always try to encourage and persuade them to do so.  The most important thing about programmability is that people can use this to make your application more valuable, to inject more energy into your application, to bring more users, more data, and more wealth to your application. Maybe 2, 3 years ago, we would have invested in web apps that weren't highly programmable, but we wouldn't do that today because, like speed, programmability is essential for successful Web applications.

6. Personalized

Personalization is very meaningful to the user, as I mentioned in my previous PPT, you want third party developers and even users to inject their "energy" into your application, and they inject more of their personalized stuff into your application, and they will have a sense of belonging and ownership to your application, This is likely to be an important force for you to push the market forward. Personalized your application is very important, there are many ways, such as allowing users to customize the background, upload avatar, add custom content and so on, and so on, which allows users to have a sense of belonging to your application.

Of course, personalization will inevitably bring some problems. When I was talking to a former female employee of Last.fm, she told me that their community users felt they were the owners of the site and that they were in charge of the site, which led to the problem: every time the site had a change, it would see hundreds of messages on the forum. I think this is a good thing because it means people are very concerned about your site, your application.

This is indeed a headache for some of the companies we invest in. For example, when we invest in a company: Meetup (need to flip the wall) last week on the page of its site made some changes, there are a lot of comments on this matter, of course, most of them are scolding (dissenting opinion). It is entirely up to you to make a positive response to these comments. But from a certain level, it's a really good thing, because it just shows people are paying attention to your application, they spend their time and energy on your application.

7. RESTful (Professional noun in computer field)

I'm not sure if I use the word correctly. I think most of us here should know what rest is (representational state transmits). It is a point of view in a software architecture that: everything should be defined in detail. But I mean the rest is a little different, even a bit improper, but anyway I still think it makes sense, still quite reasonable.

Rest in software architecture means that each resource has an accessible URL to represent it at the software architecture level. But my definition of him is a little odd, and what I call rest is the whole application level where all the resources have a URL and a very concise, Easy-to-understand URL.

Like Twitter's Twitter list, released 3 or 4 months ago, if you go to someone's Twitter page and click the "lists" link, you'll see a URL like "twitter.com/fredwilson/list/..." This URL represents all of the list on my Twitter. The entire Twitter application is built in such a way that all of its resources are represented directly by straightforward URLs. You can get the URL and send it to the Internet via email or other means.

Google will search for this URL, which allows others to discover your application and access it directly to content that was originally intended to be accessed from the home page through multiple interactions. I think people who don't build web apps in this way make a big mistake. It's like LinkedIn, which is very popular now, and it's doing a terrible job of it.

The above is what I want to say about restful, albeit a bit weird, but I think it's really important for a successful web application.

8. Make your application easier to find

This ppt is a bit like the one on the slide. When you just build your application, it's like a needle in a pile of straw. There are millions of people in the world, at least thousands of applications are similar to yours, so how do you make them discover your application? Based on this, I think all you have to do is search engine optimization. For optimization, you need to know more than just how to optimize the rules. Your application must be made easy for Google to discover.

Not only that, your application should also be easily discovered by social media. Nowadays, social media is as important as search engine in terms of communication ability. It's like a virus. First Round, founder of Capital, and my colleague, Josh Kopelman, posted a good post with the headline: "We need to inject the virus." The general meaning is that the Web application they built was not used by anyone, so he and his team said, "we inject some viruses into it." Of course, you can't do that. But your application should always be very easy to find, and it can be highly disseminated. The product itself should be oriented to the Internet, search engines, social media. That's how I talk about making your application easier to find.

9. Concise

I think simplicity means that the page you're applying isn't too crowded. Your page should make people at a glance, any page do not put too many function points on the above, to let users can see what is doing, how to use.

When I first started doing this ppt, I wanted to put some screenshots of the application on it and it felt better. But then I thought it was not good, so I put the soap up. But before this position I put is Tumblr (need to turn over the wall) the landing screen screenshot, screenshot as follows:

When you enter the Tumblr login interface, it has only two huge input boxes on the page, which is used to enter username and password, very concise and straightforward, I like very much. Users know exactly what the page is and how to use it. This is very important, many people underestimate the simplicity of the value, always feel that the more functions on the page the better.

10. Interesting

Last but not least, entertainment. Our ventures (Union Square) has 6 keywords (similar to school motto) and one that happened to coincide with what I said. The six key words are: mobility, socialization, globalization, entertainment, intelligence, the sixth I forget. Anyway, these are the things that are relevant to our web apps, and the entertainment is what I want to say.

Someone said before I put an empty space only the pictures of the water as a bad background, but I do so for a reason. The picture on this ppt is the Southern Park in San Francisco. There's only a small piece of land on top of the slide, but it was a little place where Twitter was born: it was a spring day, 4, 5 people from a company called Odeo came to the park to discuss the new project they were going to build, and finally on the small platform above the slide, Think of Twitter. That's why I want to put this picture.

In short, for Web applications, entertainment is very important. Game interactivity means that you can use him to guide users to do something. For example, this is not a web apps, a good interactive weight called The Watchers game, its good interactive expression. You can create a goal in this game and then try to accomplish it, and you can publish your goals and get some rewards when you reach your goals. It is the interactive nature of the game that Weight Watchers very successful.

Different apps can provide different gameplay interactivity, like LinkedIn, where I have friends who like to make more friends on top of it, as if people are trying to get more people to follow themselves on Twitter, or to follow more people on their own. This is another kind of interactive game.

Foursquare has a lot of game elements: such as status, badges and so on to measure the ability to dig for local information. Your application doesn't have to be as obvious as Foursquare, but what I want to say is that your application needs to be entertained. Because of this, it makes the user feel that your application is very interesting.

Greg, can you switch the screen to my blog? I posted this presentation to my blog in Sunday, the address is: www.avc.com, this is the article "Building a successful Web application 10 principles." If you look down, you'll find that there are so many messages, a total of 171. There were a few things that had been debated for 3, 4 days about whether there were more important 10 items Besides these 10, whether you were really interested in it, or whether you were thinking carefully about the application you just built, or whether you had all the key points in the 10. Of course, in the message at least mentioned 5, 6 is very critical, such as: privacy, ease of use, branding, etc. should be included, but I was asked to list only 10, so that can only be compressed into 10.

Source:

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