Fred Wilson @ FOWA — 10 Golden Principles of Web Apps
I’m at FOWA in Miami today w/ Peter and Alex from Flatsourcing. The first presentation was from Fred Wilson who makes amazing investments in great companies:
Fred Wilson — 10 Golden Principles of Web Apps
Speed — The most important feature, if its not fast, users will leave. Early adopters are forgiving, the mainstream is not.
Instant Utility — It has to give people something immediately. If you have to spend an hour loading data into the app before you can actually do something, people will leave.
Have a Voice — Stand for something, have a voice, don’t be bland. The Twitter Fail Whale ending up on t-shirts, meant that something about their voice was connecting w/ society. It sounded like a human being talking.
Less is More — Start by being simplistic. Delicious was a great example. People used it every day. You do one little thing but you do it all day, its quick, easy and fast.
Programmable — Make your app programmable. Make it possible for others to add to and build on top of your application. If your API is not read/write its not an API, its RSS. When people can add value to your application, they can add energy to your app, more data, and more richness.
Personal — Infuse your application w/ your users energy. People feel more ownership when your app is personal for everyone. Backgrounds, avatars, user generated content. Makes people care about your app.
RESTful — In a REST architecture, your resources have a URL, and can be called by that URL. Make the entire application have a clean URL. Every component has its own URL that people can remember and type in. Everyone can understand what a URL stands for, and it also is crawlable by search engines. The web can get access to your app in deep ways.
Discoverable — When you launch a web app, its a needle in a haystack. How is anyone going to find yours. You must understand SEO, and build your application from the ground up to be optimized for Google. It also needs to be optimized for social media, meaning virality. The product itself must push itself out into the web and social media.
Clean — The application itself must be clean on the page. Whitespace. Big fonts. Not too much functionality on each page. Anyone landing on the page should know immediately what to do. (Tumblr login.) People underestimate how important it is to be efficient w/ the features on each page.
Playful — The ability to play in an application is important. The game dynamic is something you can use to get users to do what you want. Weight Watchers is a good example. Set goals, and get rewarded for meeting goals. Create a game dynamic in all apps to make it “fun to play.” Foursquare uses game dynamic as a way to power the development of a local information service. Users will have more fun, and you can incent the kind of behavior you want in the application.
The marketing for an app has to be in the product. Don’t hire a marketing team. Guerrilla, street, or stunt marketing. It’s not a coincidence that two of Union Square Ventures apps (Twitter and Foursquare) broke out at SXSW. It’s authentic, and not expensive.
The Union Square Ventures, five of the six keywords they believe in: Mobile, Social, Global, Playful, Intelligent.
Here are his slides:
The 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Appshttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=tengoldenrules-100221091210-phpapp01&stripped_title=the-10-golden-principles-for-successful-web-apps-3238116
View more presentations from fredwilson.
Fred emphasized that these are his 10 principles, but there is a lively discussion going on over on his blog, where many other opinions are being expressed about what core tenants are important to an successful app.
