As my mother always said “If you are going to do something, do it well.” This sentiment seems lost on many different technologies and websites that many of us encounter every day. Sites and software that are cluttered and difficult to navigate abound on the web and on our computers.
I am writing this post in Microsoft Word (gross, I know). Just in this Word window alone there are approximately one gazillion different buttons (approximately) and options I can choose from, only a few of which are labeled, and even fewer are actually relevant to the task I am currently trying to complete. I am including a picture of my Word window, which I may have intentionally complicated to prove my point.

Now Word does what I need it to do, but it does not do it well. I don’t feel good after completing a Word document. In fact, I usually feel like a have escaped an early demise, and I quickly need to move on to something that does one thing very well, Google.

Now Google has taken the idea of doing one thing well to the extreme. They are a search company. This is very evident on their homepage. All you can do from this page is search. They are so good at searching, and google.com is so easy to use that Google has become synonymous with Internet searching.

I understand that comparing Word to Google is not really a fair comparison, but it helps me make my point. So just to be thorough lets also look at Google’s closest competitors.
Yahoo!

and MSN.com

Yikes. I was going to search for something on msn.com, but then I watched that hula-hoop video… and bought a computer. I sure wish I could remember what I was going to search for.

So what does all this mean?
The idea of doing one thing well should serve as the foundation of all technology. When technology starts to try and be everything to everyone, it becomes nothing to everyone (sorry, I totally stole that from someone else). There are many examples of technology doing one thing well, Twitter, iPhone apps, facebook Facebook (in the beginning). All of these technologies had a specific purpose and they implemented their focused functionality very well.
Twitter allows you to broadcast short messages to your friends. That is all. The core functionality is still the same, and the ease of use is astonishingly simple.

iPhone apps are another great example. Each application does one thing, and many of these do it very well.
Facebook was born as a way to connect and communicate with people you already know. It is easy to setup, and easy to find people you know. The Facebook team may have strayed from their core functionality with applications and other features, but the core functionality is still there. It is interesting to see if Facebook users begin to jump ship to the next super-simple social networking site that comes around (Twitter), the same way that people jumped from the ever-cluttered MySpace to the super clean Facebook.

As technology moves away from the “kitchen-sink” model of development towards the user-centered model, users are beginning to change with it. In the future, it will be essential to do one thing very well, and be able to integrate with other one-function technologies. This way users have complete control over what technologies they are using, and also how they choose to use those technologies together.

Until next time, keep it usable, Internets.