Fewer Features, Superior Simplicity

One of the reasons Brain Tuner, Whiteboard, and Flashlight 4 are seeing so much success on the App Store: they lack features.

I noticed this at Saigon Mobile DevCamp 2010. The easiest, most straightforward question to ask is: “Does your app do (x)?”

“Does your app find the user’s location inside a building?”

“Does your app integrate with Facebook and Twitter?”

If you say no, there’s a perception that your app is lacking in some way. It creates an assumption that you haven’t thought the idea through. It perpetuates the idea that whoever comes up with the most features, wins.

In other words: saying no, while it could actually be the better answer, sounds downright awful.

In June of 2003, Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do (x)?”, “Do you plan to add (y)?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait – put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.“

I’ve worked on dozens of projects that have essentially killed themselves with kindness: piling on feature after feature trying to be all things to all users. This rarely ends well.

After a few years in the trenches, I think many software developers begin to internalize the Just Say No philosophy. Both extremes are dangerous, but I think Yes To Everything has a greater potential to fail the entire project. If you’re going to err on either side, try to err on the side of simplicity. Keep a laser-like focus on doing a few things, and doing them exceptionally well.

Source: Just Say No by Jeff Atwood