Good product concise way

Kiss the principle of good products: Keep it simple, Stupid

Whenever I look at start-up companies, my mind always comes up with this sentence. Many start-up companies seem to want to do a hundred things at the same time, which is often a bad idea. In my observation, most companies fail to do things that they want to do too complicated.

On the surface, to provide users with more choices, let them decide what to use, how to use, there seems to be no problem. But to make a decision to the user is equivalent to setting an obstacle, the user can not usually do what wise decision, more stupid users go. Perhaps they need a learning process, eager to be properly guided.

Take Twitter for example, you can use what 140 words that are doing, it's that simple. But it quickly surpassed this simple concept, and the founders did not necessarily imagine it. Communication with others, links to great articles, instant news coverage goes beyond the notion of "what are you doing"?

At the beginning of Twitter, many people said that this service was stupid. Even so, they admit, Twitter is very simple to do one thing. During the operation, many users called Twitter and asked for such features. I've done this too. Twitter did not meet all the users. The interface is always simple, and it may be that they do not have enough engineers.

Interestingly, this incident has aroused the interest of third-party developers, everyone began to actively develop new features for it, built around the entire ecosystem of Twitter. This was denounced as a stupid service a few years ago and is now, along with Facebook, deeply influencing the internet.

Now let's talk about Facebook, a few years ago, I started using Facebook, not Myspace, but also because of its simplicity and elegance. Subsequently, Facebook rapid growth, more features have been developed one after another, it has begun to become extremely complex.

I insist that the reason why Facebook's design caused user dissatisfaction is due to complexity. To make good use of Facebook is too hard, for a seemingly insignificant change, you have to spend a lot of energy to adapt and learn, which runs counter to the core values ​​of Facebook: use the Internet to get acquainted with friends. Many users left Facebook, I am not surprised at all.

To some extent, Windows is also an example of failure due to complexity. Even a veteran who uses a computer for many years wants to play with the Windows operating system. Windows has been stuck in a cycle of adding new features to its products, new features that meet the needs of some users, and the entire system is becoming more and more bloated, difficult to use. To make matters worse, Microsoft started to introduce different operating system versions, no one can tell what the difference between them.

If you want to add new features, Gmail might be a good example of how to handle Labs, instead of rolling out new features for all users, Gmail makes Labs an option for new features so that when users do not like Labs, it's easy Turn it off.

Let us return to the simple theme, concise usually means elegant. For another example, Twitter has a lot of clients and users who have used Tweetie will appreciate the succinct charm that will not push me through my Flickr and Facebook stories. Instead, I'll do my best: showcase Twitter's information flow.

Back again to Facebook, it realizes this and begins to streamline its design. The flow of life strives to be as concise as Twitter, but what you see is just appearance. The real problem is that behind Facebook there is a series of complex community rules and relationships that make it hard to be truly concise and that you can set it up as shown in the image below.

Another app I've been watching recently is Foursquare, why pay attention to it? Perhaps because of my friends are in use, then why they use it? Because it is very simple. With FourSquare's iPhone App, checking in somewhere requires just two clicks.

Why do users like Digg? It is also very concise, you can submit the content of interest, or vote for the article, then just read the words on the list.

For most startups, can you say in a single word what your service can do? Let's try it out

Google: Search what you want

Facebook: Stay in touch with your friends

Twitter: talk about what you are doing

FourSquare: Report your current location

next? Do you have any idea?

Note: The original text from Techcrunch, an old article in 2009, was found through Google search, which was very sweet, so it was translated and found more and more like to read through the search + Link way

Source: http://www.mobilefocus.net/?p=444