Is the product a text box or a ribbon of commands
Twitter made a constraint its identity. Office had to fit thousands of commands on screen. Both designs were answers to their own problems.
Less is more. Ask yourself: is your product more like 140 characters in Twitter or the MS Office ribbon bar.
Bijan Sabet is a general partner at Spark Capital, which invested early in Twitter and Tumblr, so the first half of his comparison is a company he knows from the inside. Twitter’s limit of 140 characters came from text messaging, which allowed 160 characters per message; the rest was left for the user’s name. A technical constraint became the product’s defining feature. Every tweet looked alike, took seconds to write and seconds to read, and the whole interface was essentially a single box.
The second half is the ribbon, the band of tabs and buttons Microsoft introduced across the top of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007. It replaced menus and toolbars that had grown until many users could not find features that already existed. The ribbon was itself an attempt at simplification, and it drew complaints mainly from people who had memorized the old menus.
As a question for founders, the comparison is useful. A new product with a small team and no users should be closer to the text box. It should do one thing, obviously, with little to learn. Every added option makes the first minute harder, and a new product lives or dies in that first minute, when a visitor decides whether to stay.
The comparison is also a little unfair. Office users need hundreds of commands; accountants, lawyers and analysts use features a casual user never sees, and removing them would make the product worse for its core buyers. For professional tools, depth is often what customers pay for. The design problem there is organizing complexity, not avoiding it, and the ribbon was an answer to that problem.
The best reading is about sequence. Start with the fewest features that make the product useful, as Twitter did, and add depth only when users ask for it. When the product grows, give it structure early so it does not need a ribbon later. Some products will end up complicated. The mistake is starting that way.