Product Development: 10 Rules For Creating a Killer Web App
By Anna Johnson on April 20th, 2010Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently gave a presentation on the 10 things his VC firm, Union Square Ventures, looks for in web applications. It turns out that these same 10 qualities easily translate into 10 ‘rules’ that will likely serve anyone well in creating a killer application – whether it’s a simple script, WordPress plugin, widget, video game or fully-blown software tool.
Check out Fred’s presentation here or, for my interpretation, here are the 10 rules for creating a killer app:
1. Make it fast
Now, more than ever, users are impatient. They want results fast. The good news is that speed is relative – your application need only be faster than other, similar applications. The bad news is that users regard a lot of diverse applications as ‘similar’. Someone who, for example, performs a search on a discussion forum is likely to expect the results to come up just as fast as those they’d get on a search engine.
2. Make it instantly usable
Fred Wilson says your application must be useful ‘out of the box’. Users don’t want to wait and/or mess around with configuring the tool or performing data entry; they want the app to work straight away.
You can probably relate to this when you upload plugins to your blog. Once you upload and ‘activate’ a plugin you want it to pretty much work straight away, even if you have the ability to customize it.
3. Give your app a personality
According to Fred Wilson, software is media and, as such, should have a ‘personality’. He points to Twitter as an example of a software-as-service-as-media that has attitude and a voice people connect with.
4. Launch your app with fewer (not more) features
Launch your application with fewer, rather than more, features. There are several reasons for doing so. Firstly, you want users to grasp and be able to use the app straight away.
Secondly, it’s often better to get something to market as quickly as possible in order to gain market traction, rather than be second, third, fourth or fifth out of the gate and end up having to chase the competition.
Thirdly, by launching your product without all the ‘bells and whistles’ you let your customers tell you what you should add or change to make the app better. Not only will this help you build a product your customers want, but it also avoids overloading your app with features (‘bloatware’) they DON’T want and which actually detract from the speed and usability of the product.
5. Start an ecosystem
It’s an open software world where, depending on the nature of your app, other developers expect to be able to create applications that build on, or inter-operate, with yours. For that reason, you want to create a ‘read-write’ application programming interface (API).
By releasing your API and inviting developers to build on your app, you start expanding your ecosystem. Having an ecosystem means more companies marketing for you, and reliant on you, which in turn, brings more customers to you. You need only consider Apple, Facebook and Twitter to see how powerful it is to create an ecosystem.
6. Enable personalization
To the extent that it’s appropriate, you want to enable customers to ‘personalize’ your app – for example, by allowing them to customize backgrounds, create their own tabs or menu items, or performing other personalization tasks. When a customer personalizes your app they increase their investment in it, enhancing their loyalty towards the app and your company.
7. Use a ‘REST’ architecture
REST is an acronym that stands for Representational State Transfer. Without getting into technical details that are beyond me, the upshot of Fred Wilson’s advice to use a REST architecture is to ensure that the URLs in your web application are meaningful and descriptive, thereby allowing users to easily discover your app online.
An example of how this works is creating an account in Twitter. When you create your username you get a URL such as this http://twitter.com/annajohnson rather than http://twitter.com/someincomprehensiblemixofnumbersandletters You’ll note that until Facebook allowed its users to have their ‘own’ URLs on Facebook e.g. http://www.facebook.com/kikabink everyone’s Facebook page included that kind of gobbledygook in the suffix of the URL.
By allowing meaningful, descriptive, noun-based URLs you make your app more easily found and grasped by both the search engines and users.
8. Make it viral
Build your application with ‘viral’ qualities so that it lends itself to being spread from users to other users and across the web. Being ‘viral’ means your app will become discoverable, and therefore found and used by lots of people.
9. Use a simple, clean interface
Using a simple, clean interface makes your app more instantly usable, so when in doubt about adding more information or functionality to a given web page, go for less, rather than more. There’s an inverse relationship between ‘customers using’ and ‘customer confusion’!
10. Make it playful
Fred Wilson likes applications that let users ‘play’ with the functionality or data. When users can play with your app, there’s a game dynamic that hooks people into deepening their engagement with it.
Depending on the web application you are – or have thought about – building, not all of these rules may apply. And, of course, you can probably break some of these rules and still create a killer app. But Fred Wilson’s list seems spot on for today’s web apps. So I reckon apply these 10 rules for building a killer app, then evaluate and refine your approach based on what does – and does not – work.
Source: Fred Wilson, “10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps”, A VC, March 2010
April 21st, 2010 at 4:28 pm
It’s a really good list! Though I would like to add me 5 cents to it. Any Facebook app should by attractive from the outside, I mean handy for a user and have a good design. But its crucial to be “attractive” from the inside (code), as the Facebook API changes rather often and an application should stay live and responsive to the API changes. A bit more about that is here: http://www.acceptic.com/articles-and-reviews/facebook-application-development-tips.html