Maintianing Relevance…

I heard a quote recounted by Garrett Dimon at a recent Refresh Dallas meeting:

If everything is important, then, nothing is.

This is the most relevant golden nugget of knowledge bestowed me as of late. The sentiment is relevant in many places, but is especially relevant in product/application/website design.

Prioritizing features is a must to ensure your user understands that one thing is important over another thing. For example, color coding items in a list of messages by severity, allows the user to sift through the things that require immediate attention, and leave the lesser important stuff to deal with later. Users need this prioritization and direction.

Before beginning development on any type of project you must know the projects goals, whether they be to make waves in your industry, to track bugs, to get people to buy your product, to monitor web traffic, to display your talents or to perform usability testing. Design your product, to do one thing and do it well, and prioritize its features so that it gives the user direction. Convoluting the goals of the product/application/website will only create a less usable and more clunky product.

For example, Adobe has perfected this sentiment with PhotoShop, Illustrator and FireWorks. PhotoShop’s purpose is to edit photos, while Illustrator is fantastic at creating vector graphics, and then there is FireWorks, whose purpose is to create phenomenal web graphics. Each product does their job, and does it beautiful, but what would happend, if these products were morphed into one large, clunky, and difficult to use product? People would probably move on to an easier program that just did what they needed it to do.

There are many other such examples- not to be cliche, but Apple does a great job of this, and Microsoft does not. Microsoft tries to make everyone happy all the time, rather than making simple, easy to use programs that do exactly what the person needs them to do and nothing more.

Instead of conquering a market giant, know your limitations and develop a complementary product, that adds value to the products people are already using. Value added products are usually more welcome faces on the market that competing products, which consumers/users have to wade between to find the right fit. Just something to think about….

So, first things first, develop a list of features, cross some off, and re-assess, repeat until you have a product, that does the exact thing it was designed to do, and leave the extras, to other products, who also do exactly what they were designed to do and nothing more. And, design your product to give users visual directions within the product.