Do one thing well

There is a lot to be said about doing one thing very well. Services like Twitter started as a way to update friends on what you are doing and it has stayed true to its mission. Other services have started simple and have fallen victim to feature creep and trying to be everything to everyone.

I am particularly fond of online applications that have some focus, use the medium very well and extend the focus in strategic, well-planned ways.

Take this new site called Umbrella Today. If you go to the site and enter your zip code, it tells you whether or not you need an umbrella that day. Super simple, very useful and they extend it to mobile very logically and at the right point in the interaction.

Once you see if you need an umbrella, they offer you an option to see if you would like an SMS alert should you need an umbrella in the future.

Simplification of complex systems and applications is a niche market in itself. This is a perfect example, think about how many clicks and how much reading it takes you to find out the answer to this simple question on a weather site.

There are very few sites that can maintain their focus, but those that do remain useful and relevant. What examples of simple websites or programs do you love?

Technorati Tags:
digital, marketing, Matt Dickman, strategy, Techno//Marketer, technology, trends, Twitter

Comments

[Adam Kmiec]

Matt

What a great freaking example. How did you stumble across it?

Adam

[Damien Mulley]

Were I an umbrella company I'd be buying that.

[Charles]

I love woot.com. Instead of selling hundreds or thousands of items, it highlights one deal a day. Brilliant!

[TravisV]

I'd point out CNET's Download.com as an example of what could have been an incredible clusterf*ck of a user experience - but that was executed extremely well. It's a pretty ambitious undertaking to address the premise of people coming in looking to download *something*, allowing them to easily find it, and then allowing them to sort those results in an intuitive way and find the stuff that's meaningful to them. I've seen so many other aggregators and directories that botched up far easier challenges. I've been following Download.com pretty much since it came out ... and it started out as a very simple web app that has since evolved in a lot of interesting ways. To your point, it seems like that focus on solving a single challenge and doing it extremely well is the right starting point.

[Marlino]

Twitter is very good for online user.

[Clay Parker Jones]

Matt -

Agreed... "do one thing well" is certainly an axiom that I wish lots of sites, businesses (and people?) would try to adopt, at least in spirit. It's totally not my thing personally, but whatever.

I do wonder, though, what the traffic looks like for something like this over time. I suspect it's something like the Long Tail, only more dramatic. I don't know that it's something that people are going to keep coming back to over time...

I suppose the "One Thing" might be better defined a little more broadly, like... 37 Signals' Campfire :: Chat and 37 Signals' Tadalist :: To-Dos.

But maybe that's just me.