Whether they come straight from the actual Highest Paid Person’s mouth, or just someone who sucks up to her, or the guy who’s super-charismatic and persuasive, there’s always someone who has the last word. “I think it should be like this,” they intone. And so it shall be done.

But letting just one person’s opinion sway design and product development is generally not a good idea. That’s not to say that some people aren’t going to make better calls than others — and some people make really good calls a lot of the time. But when you can test and use actual results to figure out which way to go, you 1. find out for sure, and 2. will often be surprised. Oh, and 3. you can keep testing variations to improve your clickthrough rate/conversion rate/whatever-your-KPI-metric-is. And if there’s one thing your boss will love — and I know this even though I don’t know your boss — it’s proving that you have measurable results.

Cue one of my favorite websites, Anne Holland’s Which Test Won. (I’d like to give a shoutout to Robert Sherron, test master extraordinaire, who introduced me to it.) Which Test Won is a site for geeks like me who build products for a living, and live and die by testing. In other words, it’s for people who have done this before, and who probably have a pretty good gut instinct. Here’s how it works: the homepage has a side-by-side visualization of some kind of product test, say two webpages with different amounts of selling copy, or two different kinds of banner ads.

The user gets to vote on which version “won” — got the best response. Once you vote, you get a page with the actual results, lots of great detail behind it (including often-enlightening comments from the voters), and the % of users who voted each way.

The first time I went to the site, I voted with 70% of users. Again, these were folks like me, who build and test digital products for a living. And guess what? We, the 70%, were WRONG. (Of course, lots of times I get it right. Really.) My point being that even the people who make really good calls a lot of the time, aren’t foolproof.

In my office, at the moment, I’m the one who gets to make the “final call.” But I don’t care what anyone thinks, including me. If someone has another strong opinion, we’ll test it. And we’ll listen to the numbers.

[Photo: Anthony Easton/Flickr]

For army rangers, casual campers, and budding serial killers, the Swiss Army knife is an attractive tool. Knowing that you have a single product at your disposal that can do a variety of tasks averagely well is quite comforting. It represents a highly portable way to get by in an emergency — which clearly has value. But given the option, it’s unlikely that a three-inch nail file would be your number-one tool of choice if you needed to skin an otter — or whatever people do when they’re surviving in the wild.

One of the biggest mistakes traditional media companies make when working on their digital product strategy is to fall into a Swiss Army knife mindset. It usually goes something like this:

Employee A: We’re going to relaunch our website this year. It’s going to be incredible.
Employee B: Great. What are you planning to build?
Employee A: We’re going to have quizzes, polls, video, slide shows, social media, games, email newsletters, more social media, user-generated content, related content, tips, quotes, fun facts, Tweets, Foursquare check-ins, personality quizzes, and 87 companion apps. It’s going to be amazing.
Employee B: I’m going to vomit on your shoes.

All too often, when people think about a new digital product or get ready to relaunch a website, they aim to include every single digital feature and/or concept they’ve read or heard about in the last six months. This is akin to building a digital Swiss Army knife — something that’s mediocre at doing a bunch of things but that can’t do anything really well.

This is a particular problem within traditional media companies. Their instinct is often to keep adding more features to a product; any talk of removing or eliminating a feature is dismissed with fearful eyes. I call this the Digital Hedge. A brand that doesn’t have enough confidence to pursue one or two things instead defensively casts out 100 digital fishing lines in the hope that one of them might bite.

The most successful digital companies are those that have a clear, highly focused, dare I say it boring product focus. Think Google, Twitter, Craigslist, eBay — all hugely successful companies that began by doing one thing VERY well.

Compared to its comparatively bloated competitors, Google burst onto the scene with a highly effective search engine and an interface that seemed embarrassingly simple. Google was able to do one thing very well and go on to dominate the search market.

Imagine describing to your friends the following digital product idea:

“I want to let people fill out a text box that describes what they’re doing in 140 characters. They’ll then hit ‘submit’ and their friends will be able to read what they’ve posted!”

It doesn’t sound too thrilling from the description. But this is the idea that has allowed Twitter to grow into the digital giant that it is today. It’s breathtakingly simple, but probably wouldn’t sound very impressive in a corporate marketing PowerPoint presentation. But that’s a topic for a separate post!

Perhaps the biggest offenders when it comes to the Swiss Army knife mentality are large media companies. Look at the average website of any large media brand and you’ll be inundated with an overwhelming barrage of modules, widgets, features and graphics. It’s almost as if the creative brief read something like this:

“The goal of the site is to cover every single pixel on the screen with something. We need to give users at least 175 different ways or links to leave the page they made a point of heading to.”

Yahoo has come to represent the ultimate digital Swiss Army knife. Once known for search, it’s now known for…..well….not knowing what it actually is. By trying to be all things to all people, it’s rapidly becoming nothing to no one.

Digital product development is never easy. There are few constraints and endless possibilities. But ultimately, focus and simplicity wins the day. The next time you embark on a major digital initiative, stop and ask yourself this — do I really need the fishing hook, mini-corkscrew, and retractable toothpick?

[Editor's Note: Jonathan's Twitter feed has restored our faith in Tweetdom.  Follow him @sergiogeorgini ... you can thank us later.]

[Photo: Jim Pennucci/flickr]

As someone who writes a blog about copywriting, I find Google beyond helpful in tracking how people use language. Here’s a list of my eight favorite Google bookmarks, going from serious and pragmatic on to fun and frivolous.

Google Analytics

Thanks to its longevity, reliability, and unbeatable price (free), Google Analytics is the standard way that many of us measure website traffic. It takes some technical aptitude to set it up, but when you get it humming, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is Google’s way of showing you how its search engine analyzes and crawls your site. Again, it takes a little bit of technical work to set it up. But if you’re trying to attract search engine traffic, it’s worth your time to understand Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Adwords, Google’s real-time advertising auction service, is how the company makes most of its money, and this is your portal to all the knowledge it collects. Enter a few words and Google will tell you how popular those terms are and also suggest similar phrases in demand by advertisers. Obviously this is most helpful if you buy ads, or if you run other companies’ ads on your own site. But it’s also fun to see what phrases people search for. Type in “love” and you’ll see that a lot of people are looking for “love quotes,” “love songs,” and “love poems.”

Google Trends

Most people use Google Trends as a fast way to check what’s popular online at any given moment. But it’s also a window into historical trends. You can enter search terms and see patterns graphed over time. For example, enter “Yankees” and notice the spikes in interest each year the team made the World Series.

Google Insights for Search

Think of this as a more sophisticated version of Google Trends. Insights lets you research search terms by geographic location and time. Type in “sunscreen” for the United States and you’ll see that its popularity spikes every summer—and that it has the highest regional interest in Hawaii.

Google News Archive Search

If you’ve ever wanted to bring out your secret etymologist, the Google News Archive is your ticket. It lets you research the dates at which words and phrases first emerged in the media. Type “ringtone” and see how the word rose in popularity from 2000 until 2007—and how it’s been on the decline ever since.

The Google Books NGram viewer

Google has scanned millions of books, and you can search their data to see trends in language over time. For example, search for “gin, vodka, rum” and check out the graph that mirrors the relative popularity of those drinks over the last 200 years.

Google Correlate

If you’ve mastered Trends and Insights, here’s where you kick things up a notch. Use the “compare time series” function to enter a search word and find other words that have risen and fallen in popularity around the same time. (Did you know “strawberry” correlates perfectly to “summer styles?”) Under the “Compare US States” feature, you can discover that the word “hoagie” is popular in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware; it also correlates closely to Philadelphia-related terms like “Flyers” and “Phillies.”

Finally, if you really want to blow your mind, click “search by drawing.” Then use your mouse to draw a graph (this represents search popularity over time). Google will try to find words that match your line. I drew a graph that stayed in a straight line for a few years and then fell off a cliff in 2008. The word Google found that most closely matched it? Altavista—that old search engine that nobody uses any more. Wonder how that happened.