For most of the Time, we are excited about our websites. And as programmers, we stuff it with our 'best' thoughts. I believe that sometimes, (not all times) our best efforts can derail what we are doing.I would like to call back to the Purpose, Goals and Mission of our Site. If you allow these three to guide your actions, no matter how complex your Actions, you will see the Light. Now to illustrate this Point I have found 3 Companies which fell off from excitement.
1. Wayne Ting, a guy who started a Social Network in Columbia University a year before Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, explains how they lost to Facebook: they had too many features. The website has blogging and Photo Uploading Features while Facebook only had Friend adding, Personal Information and Status and Poking.
“A good website should have functionalities that 70 or 80% of users want to use. We had functions that only 10% wanted”
2. Marc Hedlund, is a guy who started Wesabe - a free personal finance software to assist you manage your money, financial planning, and budget planning tools. They just closed down in 2010 and threw in the towel to Competitor Mint.com.
Marc thinks they lost mainly because "they gave users too much work". Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could. Wesabe focused on accuracy but the users preferred simplicity.
3. Netflix’s Chief Product Officer summed up the entirety of his years of testing various designs in just 3 words.
Netflix was testing different user-interfaces on the PS3 streaming application. they also tested some variations on UI for iPhone, and if they summarized their learningsin three words: “simple trumps complete.”
There is a value in creating more applications and features in a website. Just beware that you always go for simplicity in doing the above.
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