Your customers are. And let us tell you, the answer is less. Definitely, less.
Let’s take two sites. We’ll call them Site A and Site B.
Site A is complicated. It’s got a bazillion features and no apparent focus. There’s a social networking component, a news feed and a messaging center. There are emoticons and badges, pictures, music and a ton of confusing menu options. All these things are jumbled together on your home page, competing for your attention. Nothing makes any sense. You spend 10 minutes just trying to check your messages and when you finally find the right button to click, you are taken to an error screen. Blinking ads (yes these still exist) fill every possible blank space on the page, as if whoever built this behemoth realized last minute that they were going to have to figure out a way to monetize.
Site B, on the other hand, doesn’t have a whole lot going on. There’s a news feed where you can post your own content or follow the content of others. The design is clean. The menus are straightforward. The functions are functional. The goal is clear.
Now, it’s obvious that Site A is not a fun place to be, but at the same time, doesn’t it have so much more going for it? A wide array of latest features? A plethora of possible activities? Furthermore, Site B sounds a bit boring…there’s only one thing you can do there.
But, here’s the most important part: Site B is functional, concise and well-designed. Site A is a disaster.
In Rework, a book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors write, “You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.” Instead of cluttering up your site with 100 features that are “just ok,” put your focus on really developing the hell out of your best ones. Because one truly great thing is always going to beat 100 mediocre things. And how can we be so sure about this?
Well, Site A could easily be Myspace, in its current incarnation…and Site B could be Twitter.
