Options and features are your enemy. When you’re building an application, or any kind of tool, really, you need to understand what it’s supposed to do, make it do that really well, and ruthlessly chop away at the “features” and “customization” that can really confuse users. Otherwise you are stuck appealing to the tiny minority that really care about these small matters and driving away the vast majority that just want to get something done. If you’re a writer, you want to devote the few seconds you have to explaining what the thing does clearly and quickly.

Here’s a frightening example of what can happen when you decide to offer too much:

(via WTF)

And here’s an example of what you are really trying to achieve with an application: an interface simple enough that you don’t really need to explain anything–you just show the user what to do and they do it. A few words of instructional text are enough, a help section would be ridiculous overkill:

(Via Signals vs. Noise)

Take all the time you need to make it work properly; don’t add things that could break it.