What percentage of an app do power users care about?
Users only care about 20% of your application
21–30 of 199 posts
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#22For different users it can be a different 20%
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#23What percentage of an app do power users care about?
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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#24I guess most people don't care about our applications at all. They care about how it solves a problem they want or need to have solved.
That is the starting point. You can get people to care if your application becomes a great tool for the things they want to do. And good tools don't get in your way.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#25For different users it can be a different 20%
Not sure if you read the article, but that's exactly its main point!
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#26I wonder of the 80% how much would they care for it if they had time to discover and learn it. And how much they really just will never care (unless their role / conpany changes).
Users are complete human beings, and their interaction with your product is a tiny slice of their life. They use your product to solve problems that they have. If the 80% of your product that they aren't using doesn't relate to their problems, they won't use it, even if they know that it exists. For example, I've never used Microsoft Word's mail merge function, even though I've known it exists for probably twenty yea…
But the thing is, being scared of something breaking is something we as software engineers have pushed onto users.
You click a control and something happens - you don't like it, but you don't know what turns it off or undoes it. There's no global state rollback. It's like the sheer terror those "don't show me this again" buttons instill - the concept is frightening even if I'm kind of annoyed by the message, and they rarely if ever include an explanation of exactly where to do to turn the control back on.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#27I wonder of the 80% how much would they care for it if they had time to discover and learn it. And how much they really just will never care (unless their role / conpany changes).
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…
My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in my area already is notorious, now its even worse.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#28> Slack works similarly with its integrations. Discord does this with bots and servers. The platform provides the foundation, but users craft their own experience on top of it.
Not really the articles core point, but to me at least, those two products are full of loads of stuff I don't want!
I thought VS code was a good example, I'm curious about if anyone has other examples that they think do modularity well?
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Styles are also b0rken in interesting ways. Have you ever tried to change the default style to justified, and headings to left-aligned? How does that work out for you in tables? Table styles in general lack all kinds of support. Auto-numbering in headings can theoretically be customized, but good luck trying to change it without following a step-by-step guide that ends up with the default numbering. Using styles is supposed to negate the need for empty lines, but the space-before and space-after properties are buggy, meaning you end up just putting an enter anyway. Empty lines also end up in headings since word often, but not always, understands that the 'enter' pressed after a heading should start a new 'normal' paragraph, rather than a mult-line heading. The keep-together, keep-with-next properties on tables/rows work only kind-of, rather than consistently. Good luck autonumbering tables, illustrations and such. Not to mention that if you work on a word document that has had its styles changed a few times, there's a lot of invisible vestigial stuff in there that will interfere with your new styles.
It makes you yearn for latex and xsl-fo(!).
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#30I'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...
This is just telemetry but IRL and no way to opt out. You can maybe hop in someone else's footsteps if you are not the first.