Indian online Web Startups need to K.I.S.S

What are the two most important ingredients for success of online start-ups?

According to me they are Usability and Simplicity.

If you get these two aspects right, chances are sooner or later you will get the sweet taste of success.

Why am I talking about this subject?

In recent times, I have been visiting quite a few Indian online start-ups and one of the major things I notice is that very few of them actually give importance to simplicity. Most of the services are quite useful; however they are just not simple and straight forward enough to turn me into a regular user. In India, Internet penetration is just starting to take-off. A majority of Indian users are first timers to the world of Web2.0. If you don?t keep it simple, they are never going to come back to you.

Take example of some of biggest internet success stories. Craigslist, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut or even Google itself. They have kept things as simple as possible.

Few years back when Google search launched, I had been a regular user of Yahoo and Hotbot till then. It was a norm to have a search box at the top and bunch of links, directories etc. on rest of the page. Although, they were useful, 95% people never used them. It added to unnecessary clutter.

I remember using Google for the first time. As soon as I launched the search page, I did not see anything else than logo, search box and button. On a very slow dial-up internet connection too, google search page launched in fraction of a second, which was unknown till then. The search results were excellent and fast as well. What else did I need from a search engine?

After my first experience, Google has always been my first preference and more than 90%, I have never needed to any other search engine. I know this is a very basic example, but most important things are the most simplest. Even today compare google and yahoo search page and you will know what I am talking about.

Coming back to Indian start-ups, there are a few of them whom I have really liked from simplicity and usability point of view. redBus is a very fine example. Even a novice can easily do the bus ticket booking without much difficulty in under 5 mins. Cleartrip and IXIGO are two other examples who score highly in my book on usability and simplicity.

Compare these start-ups with their competitors and you can immediately make out that due importance has been given to these factors.

If Indian start-ups can K.I.S.S (Keep it Simple Stupid) along with filling in the lacuna of need, they can come to par – even exceed their foreign counterparts.

(Note: My blog has not been keeping too well, we are in middle of some server upgrades and everything should be normal soon)