Money makes the world go around. But money has little to do with innovation, quality, and creativity. Money can help move boulders quicker, but it doesn’t teach you to use your head to solve problems. When you want to create something, spare no expense in the time applied figuring out what makes it great. Be willing to solve problems differently than others have approached it. Certainly, if you are in a competitive industry you always feel the need to keep up with contenders. The fact is, you have as much time as you need to develop something of very high quality. Most deadlines are arbitrary unless a specific event occurs, and you need to be prepared; some things need to take as long as it takes to get them right.

So when is something “right”? As arbitrary as the deadline, it is when you believe it is. Depending on who you are and your expectations, convincing yourself something is ready for the public may be easy. That doesn’t make it true. You should be protective of your ideas, but it is good collect and consider many opinions about what makes something fantastic. Strive for perfection, or at least as close as is possible with the resources you have.

The web has really lowered the bar for experience and quality. Anyone can hastily assemble something and call it a product. We have entered the age of mediocrity. Spend a little time on Techcrunch today and you’ll read a story or two about a new company that has decided to create a product that is merely an added feature to an existing product, and is considered to be valuable—or at least to its investors.

The iPod accessory ecosystem is an example of Apple leaving a lot of money on the table in regard to features. I don’t think the same mistake was made with the iPhone. You’ll notice there aren’t many accessories for the iPhone. I believe this is due to Apple’s nice little mixture of technologies with which developers can work. The ecosystem focus for the iPhone will be in software and web apps, not hardware accessories.

It is okay to do less. To not have every feature and leave some unexplored territory. It provides opportunity for the audience to get creative and develop solutions of their own to any problems, which will embed your product even deeper into culture.

We are guilty of applying this concept to Twitter for iPhone. We certainly do not own Twitter, or the iPhone, and we can’t trademark the word “for”. So why make a product that has virtually no future and lives outside those two worlds? The answer is simple: We are big fans of both products and we wanted our own control of how the experience was delivered. All of the other third party developers want to deliver feature-rich applications, and we wanted to preserve the iPhone and Twitter experience. We are not basing our entire business around the success of these two platforms. We are simply helping them in their efforts because we believe in what they are doing. Complicated is not what the iPhone and Twitter are about. Your product shouldn’t detract from that relationship, trying to make it your own. You should instead make it about these two great things coming together. Anything beyond that is selfish.

We believe that products should be easy to use. So easy in fact, they need zero instruction to use them. This takes an awfully long time to get right. We usually start by developing solutions to problems internally. Then, we deliver a basic version for other people to use in the public. After that, we redesign the product entirely based on the feedback and our own experience. For example, Checkbook is going through its redesign now, and Signalfire was just released publicly to collect feedback. We have a number of other things you also haven’t seen yet. We aren’t afraid to start over from the beginning again, once we have gained the knowledge it takes to make something excellent.

People who claim to be simplicity experts can’t seem to get this right. They require you to think hard to figure out how it works, or watch a demonstration. Really? That is their example of excellence and the execution of simplicity? Easy means instant comprehension and no extraneous time invested trying to understand how things work. Easy means preserving the original experience – such as filling out a check. Claiming “easy” based on previous attempts by the last guy and actually being easy aren’t the same thing. There is better and there is great. Great is what this is about.

Posted on Jul 15, 2008 by Kevin Milden

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