Apps Need to do One thing, and Do It Well!

Being a jack of all trades means that you are master of none. This is true in life, and is true for your app.

Whether you’re building an app for internal communications or for promoting a product, or whether the app IS the product, you need to make sure that your app does what it does well.

Think of a Swiss Army Knife. It has a blade, a corkscrew, nail file, tweezers, and so on. But it trades usability for portability, and as such it doesn’t do any one thing very well.

You wouldn’t want to use one to cut an expensive steak, but that’s ok, because it’s not what it’s designed to do. It CAN do it, but it doesn’t do it well.

Now think of a steak knife. It is perfectly sharp, balanced, well proportioned and does its job of cutting and slicing with ease. However, you probably wouldn’t want to take it on a hiking trip.

Your app needs to take the same approach. For your app to be truly effective, focus it on what it is supposed to do, how users will use it, and then do that.

Plus, adding on functions and options to a simple app increases development time, which increases costs and decreases your profits or ROI.

How can you learn from this?

Determine the most important thing that your app is going to do, and focus your efforts on building that. Here’s a quick and easy way to determine if your app is overly complicated:

Ask yourself

“Can I explain my app in the number of characters of a Tweet?” (The 140 character classic Tweet, not the jumbo industrial-sized 280 ones.)

The point of this exercise is that if you can’t find a way to accurately sum up your app in a short, concise, descriptive way, it’s either too complicated or you need to work on your concept.

If you can communicate your app’s value proposition to a stranger, while keeping it short and sweet, chances are you can keep yourself on track during development.