Tech & VC 17 Oct 2007 07:18 pm
Evan Williams: “Think Less”
I thought the talk by Evan Williams at Web 2.0 was the highlight of the first day. The title of his talk was “Think Less” (pun intended). By “Think Less” Ev means, “What can you take away to make something new?” By reducing the number of features and limiting the abilities of existing features, one can create interesting and desirable results.
At first glance Ev’s theme seems counter-intuitive. If the features of service A are a superset of the features of service B, and the features missing from service B are desirable to a consumer, then, all else being equal, service A should be more popular than service B, right? Wrong.
Why wrong? Ev pointed out (citing Tantek) that:
- Human interface cognitive load is proportional to the number of clicks/keystrokes/gestures
- The usability of an interface is inversely geometrically proportional to its cognitive load
In English? Less features and less options means there’s less to think about… a simpler, paired-down service is easier to use, and “easier to use” means better adoption rates and improved user experience.
A few examples of companies that intentionally simplified or restricted features in order to create a better user experience:
- Fotolog restricted photo uploading to one photo per day (originally due to bandwidth restrictions), but it ended up encouraging users to upload better pictures and created more comments on the existing pictures in the system.
- Facebook restricted registration to only college students (initially).
- Google’s simplified homepage is the classic example of the power of simplicity.
- Of course, Twitter’s 140 character limit.
Every web service I work with could benefit from this lesson. It’s kind of like that trite expression, “Less is more.” Perhaps I should have taken that lesson to heart while writing this post ;)
5 Responses to “Evan Williams: “Think Less””
on 17 Oct 2007 at 7:55 pm 1.phil said …
yes good point have thght a thousnd times about the concept of cognitive misers while
staring at the genius of goog homepage…
http://www.scottsdalecc.edu/ricker/psy101/readings/definitions/cognitive_miser.html
on 17 Oct 2007 at 10:21 pm 2.Yaron Galai said …
Great post – couldn’t agree more. Now you really should install the outbrain widget on your blog… – http://www.outbrain.com/get/
We peeled and peeled and peeled until we get to the absolute core functionality – 5 stars that work extremely well. We’re thrilled with every opportunity we find to under-do our competition on features.
on 18 Oct 2007 at 12:11 am 3.Tony Stubblebine said …
Five years ago, if you were to say “easier to use means better adoption rates,” the only winner would be the site owner because they would be getting more traffic. Now, if you’re building social software all of the users win because better adoption rates feed back into the value of the site. That’s why twitter was better than Upoc — less features led to better adoption which led to a situation where your friends were actually using it. Twitter has no value if you don’t have any friends on it.
I think a lot of reviewers struggle with that concept. Earlier this year TechCrunch did a head-to-head comparison with Twitter and Dodgeball and declared Dodgeball the winner based on strength of features. This despite the fact that you were vastly more likely to find someone you knew who was using Twitter and then go on to have a meaningful interaction through one of the “limited” number of features. Two weeks later the Dodgeball founders quit Google.
This less is more approach seems to be taking hold fine in the consumer space. I wonder what’s going to happen with enterprise software. Is the sales and purchasing dynamic such that feature lists will always be prioritized over usefulness?
on 18 Oct 2007 at 7:54 am 4.Eric Olson said …
Of course one of the prime examples of this way of thinking is 37signals. Hey, I spent a lot of time in Chicago so I have to stand up for a great Chicago company. :-)
on 18 Oct 2007 at 8:15 am 5.Weissman said …
Tumblr too (though I am biased).