“ your software will be used in ways you never imagined.”
This is actually a lot of fun to discover.
Users only care about 20% of your application
31–40 of 199 posts
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#32Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#33For different users it can be a different 20%
That’s the thesis of the article. Hard to miss even when skimming, as it’s in very large letters near the top.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
And this is only becoming worse in recent years. "Contact your administrator", "We are working on updates.." - I recently spent 10 minutes trying to find the actual location a powerpoint was saved to since every iteration of 'open location'/'open in sharepoint'/'copy link' just resulted in URLs with GUIDs or opening the document again rather than an actual path.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#35I 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…
> their interaction with your product is a tiny slice of their life
Low cognitive load should be a major goal, and that doesn't mean the app can't be feature rich. Make the app very fast, or at least hide latency from the user. No esoteric icons, instead default to plain text. If you have icons, no artificial delay between mouse-over and tooltip. No smooth scrolling. No excessive whitespace. No elements that move around while the page loads. No scrolljacking. And actually use your app so a random user like me can't find multiple bugs in it.
Chatgpt website is a good example of how to tick some of these boxes to achieve low cognitive load, despite being feature rich. It's very fast, and mousing over an icon displays the tooltip immediately. Although they have a few UI bugs that they need to fix, I would give them an 8.5/10. Gemini website is an example of how to tax cognitive load despite being feature poor and "simple". It's very slow for large contexts, it scrolljacks, and it has numerous bugs. I would give them a 2/10, partly due to the fact that it hasn't noticeably improved for over a year since I started using it, despite being one of their flagship products.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#36I'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.
That's very true. I worked for a company that was known for doing what others have done, but better. That's sort of Apple's philosophy, as well.
Anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they're patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts.
Omaha Beach was a nightmare on D-Day, but a lot less challenging, in the next few days.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#37Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#38Earlier 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…
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…
They had the week long delays before this switch :D - now they just found a good excuse
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#39I'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.
Yeah. But they can you have enough money to fix that. Problem is most users don't even make it to that point and over engineer.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#40If only they could agree on what 20% so we wouldn't have to build the rest.
No I didn't read the article but the punchline is trivially obvious.