You don’t solve “big problems” with websites.

You solve big problems with people.

You use websites to solve parts of problems, and to make the job of the people solving those problems simpler.

The most glaring roadblock that product designers run into is scope. The need to do everything, be everything for everyone all the time causes well meaning designers to start strapping every widget and dodad that might one day be useful to someone to the side of their idea until the final product ends up being so spectacularly useful that no one has any idea how to use it.

If there is one truth in the universe about product design it’s this — if people don’t know how you want them to use something, they wont.

Despite what our best intentions tell us, most people don’t care about a perfect, miracle solution that manages every possible thing that could go wrong with a particular task. Most people wouldn’t know that solution if it stared them in the face.

All people want is a reasonable way to accomplish a task with a minimal of hassles. People want something that does what they think it should do, and otherwise leaves them alone. People want products that work transparently with their lives. You don’t have to think about what is happening behind the scenes with a cell phone or a television or heck even Facebook — they work because you never have to care about how they work, and you can casually ignore everything but the core features and still find the product useful.

What then should be the role of the product designer? First, it’s understanding that complexity has never been the key to success.

• More important is building relationships with all the people you’ll need to get your product off the ground.
• More important is making it easy to collect the data that will fuel your software and your business model.
• More important is ensuring that navigation is simple and intuitive.
• More important is understanding your users goals and creating a site that gives them the tools to accomplish those goals in the simplistic possible way.
• More important is wrapping this all into a community that people will actually want to come back to.

If you do these better than the next guy, and do a half-way decent job of targeting your marketing — you win. If you try to substantially more than this, clutter your product with “great ideas,” and lose focus on your primary goal you will waste time and lose.

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