There's a marketing corollary that is called the Modified Pareto. Briefly that it's not 80/20 but 60/20. That is 20% of the heaviest or power users will consume 60% of the product. But that means the 80% will actually consume 40%. That's no longer small enough to ignore, so you have to cater to the light or infrequent user.
Users only care about 20% of your application
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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#42This is a good argument for the Unix philosophy's "do one thing" to avoid the bloat the author describes. E.g. vi, sendmail, and some bash for Word's mail merge. Or Emacs and some lisp. But then the onus is on the user to compose these tools to something that solves their particular problem.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#43They also care 0% of how it was written, unless it stands on their way, hence why nowadays we have applications of various quality levels, when looking under the hood.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#44If 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.
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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#45> 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?
I'd say Emacs and Neovim fit the mold even better than VS code. By themselves they're quite bare but with plugins, addons, and your own configuration they can become anything you want (and more!).
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#46This is a good argument for the Unix philosophy's "do one thing" to avoid the bloat the author describes. E.g. vi, sendmail, and some bash for Word's mail merge. Or Emacs and some lisp. But then the onus is on the user to compose these tools to something that solves their particular problem.
I almost commented the same, but I think the tricky bit is that it still holds: users only care about 20% of vi, etc.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#47I 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…
With Word especially (and probably with any software approaching anything that can be viewed as professional) the long tail is unbelievably long, and "users only care about 20% of your application" may actually become "users may only care about 20% where no two users share the same 20%". Here's Microsoft's own research on it from an era when people were actually doing research: https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn...
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Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")
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The whole series is great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... and there's a presentation, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#48This is a good argument for the Unix philosophy's "do one thing" to avoid the bloat the author describes. E.g. vi, sendmail, and some bash for Word's mail merge. Or Emacs and some lisp. But then the onus is on the user to compose these tools to something that solves their particular problem.
99% hardship of any advanced tool that is expected to be used by any random person is in integration, discoverability, fault tolerance, pragmatic relevant guidance.
I love Vim (RIP Bram, thanks for all the fish), but it's a tool for the less than 1% who loves that kind of thing.
Most people won't learn the tool because they see it only as an anecdotal detail bringing hindrance in their quest to "something".
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#49Pretty similar article to some old Spolsky blogposts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
It’s very similar to the second one (Simplicity).
To be fair, the author may not have been aware of these previous posts. I find that “kids these days” don’t really read the classics.
For those not aware, Joel Spolsky, Steve McConnell, Don Norman, and a whole bunch of others, really thought hard about our vocation, and wrote down their thoughts.
Might be worth a gander.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#50Pretty similar article to some old Spolsky blogposts: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
It's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged.
Some of them ended up proving wrong (like he once predicted that making graphic cards would be a very thin margin business[0]), but most are still true today. Probably truer than when they were written.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v In his defense, by the time 'video chips' were totally different things from today's mighty 5080.