Users only care about 20% of your application
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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#2I 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).
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#3[flagged]
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#4[flagged]
Uh, did you open the link at all?
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#5I 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. Especially Word is way to complex for the needs of most people, Wordpad covers the needs of most home users. I also thinks that's where the recentment for the remaining features come from. It's not that there's some number of feature hiding in a corner that's the problem, it's that almost the entire application is "useless".
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#6> Instead of fighting feature bloat, you can embrace the idea that your software will be used in ways you never imagined.
Which is why interoperability is the most important feature you can embrace.
I get the abstract sense reading this article that the main problem is software and sometimes version specific file formats. I don't mind cobbling three tools together, it's just that the tools seem to mind being used as part of a pipeline.
The dream of Unix is a tricky thing.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#7I 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…
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.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#8Pluralism, huh. I suppose this applies to games, too, the different ways people enjoy the same game.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#9I 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 years, simply because I've never needed to send out a form letter to a whole bunch of people.
Sometimes, there is indeed a new feature that could solve a problem that they have, but they don't know it exists. I've seen a lot of pop-ups in software that try to tell me about new features, but I never read them, because I'm always trying to do something else when they appear. Emailed newsletters also don't work, because the marketing people who design them always make them look like advertisements.
Finally, many computer users are deeply incurious about their computers, and are often too scared of breaking something to try an unfamiliar feature.
Re: Users only care about 20% of your application
#10Users dont care about 1% of my application, lets be real.