UX Magazine published an interview they did with David Heinemeier Hansson (author of Ruby on Rails programming framework, partner in the company 37Signals – the creators of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack).  I found this article to be very insightful, not only from a application develpment standpoint, but also concerning making good business decisions.  However, there was one thing that stood out to me and that was the importance of making applications simple.

Now how many applications do you come across that are really simple and easy to learn/use?  As a developer, its easy to get caught up in making our applications so flexible and so feature rich, trying to think of every possible scenario and everything that a user may want to see it do – resulting in a very complicated system that is hard to support.

But how about taking a different approach?  What if we started with a few key features and really developed those features well?  How do you think users would respond?  There may be some things they want to see the application do (and I think it is worth it to listen to them), but I think they would continue to use it more and even get others to use it as well – resulting in a win-win situation for the developer and the user.

Click here to read the interview.  It is definately worth it.

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