It is very rare to see people being honest about their failures and openly sharing the lessons they learnt from their failure. However, Ari Paparo did exactly this and wrote this excellent post on his blog about why his company Blink.com, an online bookmark manager, failed!

Here’s a quick recap of the lessons that Ari learnt from Blink.com’s failure (and what you should not repeat).

1. Defaults Matter + Folders Suck : In non-geek terminology this means that you really should not make your users think much. People are lazy.

You may have better options than what your competitor has but you make your user think how to activate / use those features whereas your competitor doesn’t, by offering the best possible configuration as default. So, who has the edge here?

Taking the example of online eMail services, with Yahoo and Hotmail, you can create folders and file your eMail in them whereas with Google’s GMail you can create tags and you can assign each eMail as many tags as you want.

Now, if I get an eMail and I want to organize it in either Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, what I will have to do is that I will have to think what is the best folder that this eMail can be filed into and then assign it to that folder. However, with GMail, I can assign all the tags that I can think of (i.e. all the associated keywords).

No doubt I am so in love with GMail.

Lesson : Don’t make your users think.

2. Make it Instantly Useful : Don’t make your users / prospects take two steps when one step can do it. People are lazy.

Again taking GMail’s example, when they added a Save eMail as Draft feature it was nothing new, Yahoo already had it. However, they added an autosave feature which automatically saves my eMails every 10 seconds or so, while I am typing it.

This helps me just in case I am in the middle of typing a long eMail and somehow my browser crashes or I close the brower window by mistake then all would not be lost.

And oh, they activated this thing by default. They also did the same when they added an RSS reader to GMail. Though, it’s a different matter that I deactivated it but still they made that thing Instantly Useful to me.

3. Don’t Let Technology Decide : Again, make it as simple as possible. Ari has an excellent personal experience that I’d like to quote :

We added a “find similar” button to the Blink interface, and the results were often quite good. The problem was that we were once again asking the user to go out and do things. The vision was that the similar sites would just be there, the same way Amazon presents you with the related products. But the servers couldn’t handle it. They could barely handle it when the users actually clicked to see results, let alone on every pageview.

I suggested a compromise. Instead of the algorithm, how about just using the text of the folder name as the key. Show the top 10 sites in all folders with the same name, across all users. I was basically suggesting a rudimentary tagging system, using folder names as tags. I was voted down – too simplistic, too hacky. And anyway we had this sophisticated algorithm, which might work one day …

The main lesson of this post / Blink’s failure is that people are lazy. Try to make things as simple and easy as possible. And please, don’t make your users think or forget that small things matter.