It’s been said that the best way to learn a new skill is to teach it. The same is true of your users: the more you try to understand what they want, what they’re good at, and what keeps them from achieving their goals, the better off your web application will be. So if you’ve got a failed web app in your past—or even just one that didn’t take off as quickly as it should have—here are some lessons learned:

Don’t get too ambitious.

You should be careful not to get too ambitious when designing your application. If you want the best results, it’s important to focus on what’s most important and leave out anything that isn’t essential.

For example, if you’re working on an e-commerce website and want users to be able to make purchases online, then making sure that feature works well should be your top priority–not adding in a social networking component or live chat support options. The same goes if you’re developing an app for iOS devices: don’t try building something that competes with Facebook Messenger just because both apps use text messages as their primary mode of communication (and also because Messenger has more users).

Keep it simple.

The most important lesson to learn from failed web applications is to keep it simple. Don’t add unnecessary features, and make sure the application is easy to use.

You should also avoid making users do too much work, or think too much about what they’re doing in your app.

Test, test, test.

• Test in a staging environment.
• Test in a production environment.
• Test with different browsers and devices.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

When you are building a web application, there are several tools that can help you get started … Read the rest