Check out 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail, a great article by Josh Porter on Bokardo.com. Here are the main points:

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.

The one that’s been on my mind most lately, in designing Beyond, is #2:

2. They solve too many problems, or try to.

This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…

Technorati Tags: Web2.0

Posted in Web2.0
Comment feed for this post