Wordle, clarifying that less is more.

“What product impressed you the most last week?” is a question I’ve asked myself for some time. In January 2022 the answer was obvious, “Wordle – A Daily Word Game".

At the time I answered:

Wordle has taken the world by storm and is incredibly elegant. It's so successful that when you Google “Wordle” you see a doodle emulating Wordle’s UI. Personally I put its success down to the following:

1. Simplicity: Any English speaker can play by simply hitting a URL, no app install bullshit.
2. Scarcity: You can only play it once per day.
3. Sharing: Sharing doesn’t spoil the day’s game for others and uses built in emoji block icons. I share my progress with friends and family every day.
⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️🟨
⬛️⬛️🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I now view Wordle as one of the best web products ever created. It was created by Josh Wardle with help from his partner Palak Shah (Bravo!) and was initially made public in October 2021 before being “purchased by the New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum”.

Wordle is a shining example of the magic that can occur when we embrace constraints. Having worked as a software engineer and product manager at companies big and small I can testify that companies and teams don’t embrace constraints enough.

To clarify just how exceptional Wordle is let’s pretend we’re at a well funded company and are tasked with shipping “A Daily Word Game” (I’m ignoring any changes made to Wordle post acquisition). We’ll start by listening in on the hypothetical kickoff meeting:

Hey everyone, we get to ship a new daily word game called “Suckle”. Our game design is ready and it’s up to us to ship the game and drive adoption.

We’re fortunate to have closed our Series B last month, it means we have time and resources on our side. The team consists of a product manager, five engineers, two designers, and we’ll have support from our PR agency when we need it.

First, let’s capture the key features we need to ship:

Game play experience
Account system –– with Google, Apple, Facebook integrations
iOS & Android Apps
Marketing Website
Leaderboards –– so you can compete with friends
Invite System –– so we can do “growth hacking”
Notification System –– so we can remind people to play daily
Review Prompt –– to nudge people to review us in the app stores
<N other things that aren't needed>

While hyperbolic there are seeds of truth to this meeting dialog. The default at most companies is to do more, not less. This frequently results in bloated software that is more difficult to ship and maintain.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say most teams and companies wouldn't even consider building a web first game in 2022, a decision that immediately increases development costs and exposes any effort to App Store taxes and dependencies.

What makes Wordle so special is everything it didn’t do.

Let's review what Wordle didn't have:

No account system. Not needed, the job to be done is to deliver the joy of playing a word game for fun.
No iOS or Android Apps. Why bother? URLs have worked for quite some time and nothing about Wordle requires native app capabilities.
No marketing website. The game is the marketing website.
No Leaderboards. Friends kept track themselves over text, due to the elegant sharing feature.
No Invite system. Not needed, browsers have built in URL sharing.
No Notification system. 🤢 hopefully I don’t need to explain this one, if I do give Digital Minimalism a read.

All of these points are succinctly captured by @desandro:

Wordle is a website. No React. 75 KB main.js source +100 KB of words

Let’s teach ourselves to do less and embrace constraints when it comes to product development.