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Users only care about 20% of your application

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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#11

Post by johannes1234321 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #7
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies frequently moan about "re-training", but in my experience users of e.g. Word, or Excel don't need re-training, they need training. A large number of people how "Knows Word", can't use any of the feature beyond changing the font and font size, not even the "headings". For product like Microsoft Office (or whatever it's called these days) 20% is ludicrously high. I'd guess more in the 1% - 2% range. Especiall…

It often feels like the people who spend the most time in those applications are the ones least likely to explore the software’s capabilities. I’ve lost count of the number of Word documents I’ve had to edit where the creator completely ignored styles and formatted every element individually.

It is a lot simpler to count the opposite.

Working with styles is relatively complicated (not hard, but distinct form pure wysiwyg picking font&size and hoc) and for most small documents doesn't have much of a benefit in the result.

For larger documents or professional work it's relevant, but by then people are used to adhoc ways

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#17

Post by cheschire »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12

I've found that I'm not so good at anticipating how my work will be used, so I tend to "pave the bare spots"[0]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/#pavi...

Desire paths are how I recommend IT policy and governance is written too.

But it is worth noting that this can have trouble scaling in a complex enough environment and can be more expensive in the long run.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#18

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cheschire wrote: post #17
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12

I've found that I'm not so good at anticipating how my work will be used, so I tend to "pave the bare spots"[0]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/#pavi...

Desire paths are how I recommend IT policy and governance is written too. But it is worth noting that this can have trouble scaling in a complex enough environment and can be more expensive in the long run.

Very much so. It can probably be scaled to a degree, via structure and process.

I’m not a huge fan of the CMMI, but Level 5 prescribes pretty much exactly that, though applied to the production process, as opposed to the end product.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#20

Post by al_borland »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #7
mrweasel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies frequently moan about "re-training", but in my experience users of e.g. Word, or Excel don't need re-training, they need training. A large number of people how "Knows Word", can't use any of the feature beyond changing the font and font size, not even the "headings". For product like Microsoft Office (or whatever it's called these days) 20% is ludicrously high. I'd guess more in the 1% - 2% range. Especiall…

It often feels like the people who spend the most time in those applications are the ones least likely to explore the software’s capabilities. I’ve lost count of the number of Word documents I’ve had to edit where the creator completely ignored styles and formatted every element individually.

The only time I bothered with styles was when I was looking to create cohesive documentation for a large team, along with templates to help others create such documents.

Ironically, at the time the corporate templates didn’t even use styles. It was just a 5 page doc with all the different things a person might use, and we were expected to copy/paste what we wanted to get the proper formatting. This wasn’t officially stated, but that was the only way I could see to use it.

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