Part of the beauty of Less Content, More Strategy, is that it doesn't just apply to digital products. It can apply to so many other aspects of life, too.
In this recent Inc. article, Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium talks a bit about focus.
When I meet with the founders of a new company, my advice is almost always, "Do fewer things."
Like many in the startup/tech world, I'm a Fake Grimlock fan. I read a Q&A with him today in Venture Beat that featured some illustrations he did for the upcoming book The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits.
How's this for less content? Awesome.
(Copyright not mine.)
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/captcha-22-when-online-security-hurts-sales
Yep! LOVE to see a major e-retailer getting on board with this! (They're not tossing the concept entirely - just replacing the useless "type these unrecognizable characters" with a much-easier-to-solve puzzle or question.
As with any content, there are costs and benefits to having a CAPTCHA. The main benefit, of course, is keeping bots away from your transactions. (Though they can be hacked, so that benefit isn't as absolute as one might think.) The cost is in paying for the service itself (probably not much) and in risking alienating actual paying customers who get frustrated when they can't figure out the CAPTCHA.
Image via http://blog.formstack.com/2012/10/18/good-bad-captcha-guest-post/.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe your paying customers are SO motivated that they will go through 1,000 CAPTCHAS if that's what it takes to buy something from you. (But probably not.) Maybe you are such a hacker target that you really really need a reverse Turing test, even if it's flawed and alienates some customers. (But probably not.)
While I'll concede there are absolutely legitimate uses for reverse Turing tests, there are better ways than CAPTCHA to handle the spam/bot problem.
In a mobile application, it is better to cleanly provide the 20 most important pieces of information than force people to navigate through 100 that they might never use.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9235552/Tech_hotshots_The_rise_of_the_UX_expert
LOVE the start to this article! Though, naturally, I would go even further and suggest those other 80 items may not just be irrelevant for mobile. Most are probably not really relevant at all, or at least don't provide enough benefit to justify the cost of producing and maintaining them.
The rest of the article is interesting in its own right, though it's not really about reducing content. Enjoy!