Minimalism – Likely the most undervalued development skill

Disqus

446K

Custom: 3.2K

Optimizely

798K

Volument: 3.9K

Sentry

58K

Custom: 0.2K

Above you see some popular SAAS products. This website uses alternate versions of those products, that we built from scratch in a minimalistic fashion. That is: we only built the core functionality, in a way we wanted, and left out all the rest — the “crap”. The resulting product is faster, has fewer issues, is easier to use, and gives us more control. Seriously.

Let's skim the details:

• Disqus is an embeddable commenting software. The one you can seeon this page is significantly faster, has no annoying clutter, and is easier to use.
• Optimizely is a popular A/B testing software. It is 200 times bigger thanvolument.js andhas tons of issues.
• Sentry is an error tracking tool similar to Raygun . They are both 200-300 times bigger than the code on this site:

window<b>.</b><b>onerror =</b> <b>function</b><b>(</b>msg<b>,</b> _path<b>,</b> line<b>,</b> column<b>,</b> error<b>)</b> <b>{</b>
  fetch<b>(</b><b>'/errors'</b><b>,</b> <b>{</b>
    <b>error:</b> error <b>?</b> error<b>.</b><b>stack :</b> <b>''</b><b>,</b>
    <b>column:</b> column<b>,</b>
    <b>line:</b> line<b>,</b>
    <b>msg:</b> msg
  <b>}</b><b>)</b>
  <b>return</b> <b>false</b>
<b>}</b>

Just think about it: when the core is just 1% of the product, what does the rest of the code do? Likely nothing you absolutely need.

Maintenance is another thing. Volument client weights 4kb which corresponds to 350 lines of source code. With this ratio, Optimizely client has 70,000 lines of undocumented code.

We have a single developer taking care of the codebase. Does Optimizely need ten people to handle theirs? Or twenty? We don't know, but one thing is for certain: 20 people make more redundancy, technical debt, and bugs than one.

According to HTTP archive the average size of a web page has gone up from 460K to 1850K in nine years. The internet is four times fatter.

If you are struggling to find a market for your product, do what nobody else seems to do: choose minimalism as your leading product development strategy. Start making less, but significantly better stuff.

Listen to Steve Jobs or Dieter Rams on product design, Salvatore Sanfilippo on programming, and Seth Godin on content.

Minimalism is a sparse human skill to strip down everything to bare essentials. It's the ability to say no to 99% of things. It's hard, but it makes a difference. Likely more than you think.

Minimalism is hard because it scares the hell out of your bosses. They seem to prefer the opposite. They ask you to add more call-to-action buttons, make them bigger, and “spice them up” with fancy background colors. More is more.

This is hard to swallow because, as designers, we were taught to focus on usability. It certainly didn't help, that our former A/B testing tool emphasized short-term wins. When we added a huge sales overlay, it appeared to bring more conversions — since the return visitors were ready to take action. The new visitors probably hit the back button as soon as they arrived.

This is the reason we started building Volument. We wanted to show the marketing team, that conversions are results of great user experience. We wanted a rock-solid optimization tool without themeasurement problems and we didn't want to waitabsurdly long to get the results.

We can finally pursue our minimalistic religion, iterate quickly, and collect maximum wins.