Users Only Care About 20% of Your Application

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some might use the debugger and some might use extensions and some might use AI and so on ... but there's nothing 80/20 (or 20/80) about the core of the product, and that seems to directly contradict the article's point.

1. Observation: 80% of users only interact with 40% of the software

2. Conclusion: lets cut part of that 60%, since those are rarely unused features

3. Observation: 80% of users only interact with the 40% of the remaining software

4. Conclusion: lets cut..

You get the idea. In reality the most important thing is that users perceive your software to be able to solve their problems. If you want them to spend money you need to give them the feeling your software could also solve their problems if they came around in a slightly different shape. And those different problems may be covered by the unused features.

If you for example look at 3D software, that bone rigging system may be used by only 2% of users for 1% of the time, but a much higher fraction of users may not even consider your software if it doesn't have that feature in comparison to other software, even if they don't need it yet.

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".

Once you have a pdf viewer users want rotating pages, then bookmarks, then highlights, then form filling, etc.

That “just a pdf reader” is strictly worse than every pdf editor (which have to meet the minimum requirement of a pdf reader).

Apple’s Automator and Preview combo for me are indispensible and perfectly follow the Unix ideal. Automator composes well, and Preview does all the pdf editing well, and together they’re excellent software.

The version of Preview Apple just released on iPad is however basically just a reader, and do it hasn’t made itself relevant to any of my workflows or needs.

Full featured plus composable. That’s the sweet spot for the best apps.

Side note: I’m surprised there’s no ffmeg or imagemagik for pdfs (maybe there is?). Someone should build that.

I think you may need to go see a doctor about that, seriously.

Damn you must get a lot of fiber.

"Unless it's Enterprise users. Then 1000 Enterprises all care very seriously about 2 custom features no one else cares about. You had to do horrible things to your code base to support, that will only kick some poor dev in the face two years after you left, and a year after the customer churned."

But if you think about what's happening today, things have plateaued. Most people since at least 2005 probably have laptops, and generally those hover around 250GB, 500GB, 1TB of storage (with the bigger difference being top of the line/more expensive configurations, than with generational differences). More likely people now identify with 64GB, 128GB, 256GB for smartphones and tablets.

We will soon reach a point of mass market computation where the "mature" times are longer than the early years (1980 - 2005 = 25 years, 2005 - present day = 20 years and counting).

Large leaps, at least in storage, don't really happen (50MB to 1GB is <<extremely>> consequential, 500GB to 1TB is meh.

Not a week later I was back to figuring out what to delete to free up some space for a new game...

Did you write that entire comment based on the headline only?

That’s kind of the article’s main point.

Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other customer started using by coincidence and is using it in totally wrong way but it somehow works good enough but still initial effort is not paid back and best would be to kill the feature.

I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them?

Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour schemes was just going to confuse users?

Would they think obscure jargon like 'vlookup' was too confusing, and difficult to localise internationally? Would they think formulas were too complicated to ever be a mass-market feature, as well as too difficult to input on mobile?

Would they discover 80% of office suite users don't use the spreadsheet beyond shopping lists, and replace it with a shopping list tool?

My theory is the modern software industry couldn't produce such a product. I don't think I've seen the industry produce a mass market product that requires a comparable level of user expertise in 20 years.