Any web application that is intuitive, simple and elegant will always win out over competitors that offer more features but poor usability and excessively complex user interfaces.  Function, utility and usability can be easily obscured by too many dark gradients, rounded corners, excessive buttons/icons, and unnecessary text.  It’s important to remember that humans experience the everyday world through multiple levels of mental processing: instinct, learned behavior and conscious thought.  If your application fails to connect with users on that first level, instinct, they will be far less likely to want to continue to use your application.

A perfect real-world example of this is Twitter.

I really like using Twitter.  It’s an extremely simple application and it has one focus: make it easy to send/receive short status messages between you and your friends, and optionally the rest of the world.  One could even make the case that it is effectively a micro-blogging platform.  But Twitter is down all the time.  It’s always over capacity, and sometimes it loses status updates.  But people still use it anyways, and its usage seems to continue to increase despite its stability issues, and despite the fact that there are many other similar applications out on the web today.

If Twitter were to change very much about what they provide, they would probably start to lose their market share.  But people are willing to put up with the occasional outages and blips just because they know once it’s back up again, it’ll be its same user-friendly, elegant self.

In short:

• Avoid being feature-rich but functionality/usability poor
• Less is more — given two perfectly good ways of solving a problem, the simple answer will most likely be the correct one
• Design for intuitive use — imagine sitting your 80 year old grandparents in front of your application and trying to explain to them what it does and how they can use it
• Art is not always functional — while it’s critical to have a clean looking interface, make sure that you don’t sacrifice functionality and intuitive design for artistic motives

Filed under: Consumer Web, Enterprise Web, Product Management