Technology that adds by subtracting

We think about ‘adding’ and ‘subtracting’ a lot when it comes to creating digital experiences for people.

Feature additions are a reality of long-term web projects, because organizations shift over time, and it’s simply not possible to know what features you’ll need in five years. So you add to them piecemeal over time, layer by layer.

But how tall can the stack become before it collapses? This is where subtraction comes in.

We’re not talking about oversimplification, because heaven knows these websites should actually do things, not just exist for the sake of existing. Instead, we’re talking about the importance of recognizing patterns, optimizations and room for simplification where a three-step process can become a single click, or a feature that nobody uses can be stripped out to make room for something better.

Are you improving someone’s workflow, or giving them more to do?

It’s easy to add ‘things’ that don’t need to be added

We’ve all been there. Someone’s installed a new plugin for your newsletter, or a flashy new platform for your training material.

Additive decisions like this make sense at the time, and are usually made with the best of intentions. And occasionally, some of them end up being the right choice.

But without attention, the technology we use can become overwhelmed by connection points. A plugin that was installed two years ago might have a very fragile connection to the rest of your stack, or the lovely new form service that you installed last month might pivot their company strategy and remove the one feature that you installed it for.

These things happen.

When they do, it may be time to look at things from a holistic perspective and consider what you can subtract, or even consolidate into existing system. You might be facing a problem that actually needs less technology.

Subtraction as an improvement

One of our favourite things we shipped this year was an exercise in subtraction. #HalfTheStory, a youth nonprofit we work with, had their curriculum on one platform and their website on another, at two addresses, with two content systems between them. We absorbed their curriculum into their new CMS under one path, sharing one codebase and one content system. This had a lot of benefits, including auto-signup, which wasn’t possible with the previous system. Users no longer had to visit two separate sites to get the content they needed, and team members no longer had to spend time manually managing signups.

In this case, the stack shrunk but the platform improved.

Another case: the website we built for Rise Calgary, where program forms were all built separately, landing in different inboxes. We consolidated all of these separate solutions into a single form type, giving their team a clean way to build a form and a clear endpoint. In this case, their team needed fewer options with a more honed and intentional solution instead of free rein.

Our first question

We open projects by asking our clients what’s getting in their way. We love building pretty things (who doesn’t?) and during the polishing phase, we really dig into that.

But it’s so, so important to ask the right questions at the start of the project, so you can direct your work toward making people’s daily tasks simpler and more efficient, instead of leaving them with an expensive system and more problems than they had when they started.

What task or integration takes half an hour of your day, every day? That’s a great place to start.

There’s a fine line between a website that looks good for a few years then collapses under its own weight, and a site that continues to grow over time and continues earning its keep. And it’s up to you to ask the right questions to take you to that destination.