In the 80s, 90s and 00s it was always bigger better faster more. It’s still true in the consumer electronics world but with apps, the trend is towards doing less. The received wisdom is, do one thing really well, but that’s not where an app’s unique value comes from. It’s easy for there to be multiple apps that all do an equally amazing job of solving consumer problem x in isolation. The value comes from the audacity to omit features that have been writ as standards of whatever solving consumer problem x might be.

It was a standard in messaging that you had 160 characters to play with. Not so with twitter. It was a standard in messaging that you could go back through your chat history. Not so with Snapchat. It was a standard in messaging that you knew who you were interacting with. Not so with Secret/Whisper. It was a standard of messaging apps that you could at the very least, write whatever text you wanted. Not so with Yo.

Cattle-prod, tase and otherwise brutalise

It’s not that Yo is a profoundly great messaging platform or that Flappy Wings is an amazingly well balanced game or even that Vine is a great way to record video — it’s that they have each chosen judiciously what not to include — that’s what they’re good at. They are good at brazen omission — the ability to see past what has become accepted wisdom, slice it out wholesale with a cavalier abandon and then cattle-prod, tase and otherwise brutalise whatever’s left into oddly compelling new shapes.

I think that some people mistake this trend of creative omission for simplicity. The truth is, adding seemingly novel constraints doesn’t make things more simple, removing those constraints does. Imagine not having to tame your perfectly formed 153 character thought into something Twitter could swallow. Think of the extra laughs you could wring out of your followers if Vine granted you enough seconds to justly capture the majesty of your roommate’s psychotic expression when they sneeze. The truth is, the content would get worse, not better.

Choice varnish

Constraints force us to make difficult editorial choices. There is a temptation when designing any kind of communication experience, that constraints are friction inducing barriers to be removed and that anything that slows your user’s expressive potential should be lacquered with choice varnish.

Choice. We think we want it, we think it gives us the freedom to fully explain ourselves to the world. Not true. We are far too good at bad choices to create things that people will enjoy without a guiding hand. Medium’s inability to automatically excise my bizarre home-improvement metaphor from the above paragraph serves as a case in point, but let’s move on.

A soggy, quiverring dog in a tin bath during a lightening storm…

The great thing about apps like Yo and Snapchat is that their success stimulates a wave of creative riffing in their wake. I guarantee that following the news of Yo’s explosion of downloads, a thousand lunch times at a thousand startups have been mottled by the sound of entrepreneurs taking its omission (in Yo’s case, the ability to communicate anything other than one pre-defined two letter word) and applying it to other ideas between mouthfuls of yellow tail and quinoa salad.

This is where people usually make the hallowed Steve Jobs reference and eulogise about Apple’s unique talent for omission. Balls. When it comes to leaving core features off the table Apple is a soggy, quivering dog in a tin bath during a lightening storm in comparison to the founders of a handful of successful startup entrepreneurs I could care to mention in any given month. Admittedly apps to consumer electronics is an apples to oranges comparison (ahem) but Apple is > everything because of what they don’t ship, is a tired trope worth calling out all the same.

The point is, smart omission often inspires new product sub-categories (and in rare cases, whole new categories) in the software world and that’s something to consider when speccing out a feature set for any new idea.

Angry bears with knives for teeth

The other great thing about surprise hits like Snapchat, Yo and Vine (don’t even bother — just admit you didn’t see them coming until they were already bearing down on you like angry bears with knives for teeth) is that they give us all the false impression of accidental heroes. Though these companies are anything but accidental heroes of their industry, with each carefully plotting then executing their successful attack on stagnant product niches, their feature omission inspires incredulity among onlookers.

Who’d have thought it, we say. Maybe my idea for a subscription based dog-toothbrush delivery service isn’t the product of a broken mind after all, we hope.

If the misguided perception of accidental heroes gets more of us trying to make things, irrespective of how ill-conceived our ideas may be, then that’s a good thing, assuming any endeavour is conducted under the mitigating doctrine of lean methodology and in particular, validated learning).

A crucial sense of the absurd

Speaking of which, one final thought. Lean methodology has never been more important in realising the idea that is worth working on than it is now, but that does not mean that smart omission is achieved solely through the methodical process of crafting an MVP.

Smart omission is much more than omitting features in order to efficiently get to validation of a core idea — it’s about a little magic and misdirection. It’s about flaunting conventions and honing an ability to question or ignore accepted wisdom about user needs and desires. It’s about inspiration and a freedom from what has come before. It’s about notions so contrary to expectation that users will try it out of sheer morbid curiosity before they’ve even understood if they want it or not.

It’s about an infinitesimal but nevertheless crucial sense of the absurd.