How to Optimize a Task

Software developers usually obsess about how quickly a web page loads or how fast a part of a system runs. That’s usually bad prioritization. Your first priority should be to shorten the time for the overall task.

Here is why: When you think about how to speed things up for the overall goal you come up with meaningful improvements for the whole process. For example, you might decide to remove a step completely instead of optimizing the hell out of it.

When you limit yourself to improve local maximas you miss opportunities to improve the overall process.

This does not only apply to software development. In our day to day life we forget about our main goal and get bogged down dealing with small stuff. You might go out to spend good time with your partner and then ruin your night because the food is late. When you forget about your overall goal bad things happen.

The best way to optimize a task is to always keep your overall goal in mind. Always have a good answer for “Why are we doing this?”.

Going very fast in the wrong direction is not helpful.

While building our product I have a single overall goal. Whatever change we make, whatever features we add, I always keep this goal in mind.

We are in the forms business. Making forms is not fun. I don’t want to sugarcoat it. I don’t want to turn it into a game. Making forms is boring. It is not something you would do on your play time. That’s why I want to make sure people can create forms as quickly as possible. That’s my overall goal: Make it Quick and Let Them Get On With Their Busy Lives!

When I speak with one of our users with 500+ forms my first question is “what are you spending most of your time at?”. My goal is to find out how we are wasting their time and how we can get optimize those things out.

Facebook’s goal is to make sure you spend more and more time in their product. My goal is to make sure our users spend less and less time with our product. Facebook’s overall goal and mine are completely opposite.

Facebook tries to find out where you spend most of your time and gives you more of it. I try to find out where you spend most of your time and get rid of it.

Facebook tries to get you to visit their site very often. I try to implement as many features on email as possible so that you don’t have to visit our site as often.

Let me share you some concrete examples to what kind of unusual changes we made to make sure we get our users not spend too much time with us. Remember: To optimize for the overall goal you might do things that does not sound right.

Who Needs a Homepage?

When I visit a product website my first instinct is to find its demo or browse its screenshots. I don’t bother with reading the landing page. I will probably only read about it if the demo excites me about the product.

That’s why I decided to take an unconventional route and have no homepage for JotForm. When you go to JotForm, you get JotForm. You don’t get description of JotForm. You don’t get marketing fluff. You get the product right away. You get the meat.

Signup? We don’t Need No Stinkin’ Signup!

How would you feel if your grocery store gave you a long list of questions to fill out before letting you enter the store? I bet you would be enraged. Well, today, the internet is like that.

I decided to not ask for registration. You can use JotForm fully without ever signing up for it. Create your form, add an email address to receive your form responses and you are done.

Of course, many people still signup. Signups are not bad. It is just that forcing people to signup before using the product is annoying.

Creating Forms? Do I Need to Really Build Them?

The fastest way to create a web form? How about not creating it! What if the forms are already created and all you had to is to pick one? We spent incredible amount of time and created the first 500 form templates and then we let the community take over. Today, JotForm has over 2500 of ready to use templates to choose from. Users don’t need to waste time creating forms, they simply choose the one they need.

There are many other ways we save our users’ time. We continuously look for them. JotForm Instant is an interesting case study because it is a great example on how you can come up with product or feature ideas by thinking about your overall goal. It is basically the quickest way to create a web form. Just two steps: Pick a form from a list of 2500 form templates and enter your email address and that’s it! You have a fully functional form ready for use.

Best software is invisible. If a user can accomplish her task quickly, congratulations, you have accomplished your job. If you remove all unnecessary steps and leave the bare minimum your product will be better for it.

Go for the overall goal. Because that’s what matters.