Users Only Care About 20% of Your Application

Summary

I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually important. After the computer failed to boot, I would have to reinstall Windows and Office 97. My father spent countless hours in the Office Suite and always reminded me to make sure I installed MS Excel. I didn't understand what it was for. The interface looked very confusing to me. But then one day, I was writing some gibberish in Word and wanted to add a table. I didn't know how to add a table in Word. I asked my father, and he didn't know how to do it in Word either, but he had a trick: if you open Microsoft Excel, you can copy tables from Excel and paste them into Word. So in my mind, the only reason Excel existed was to copy and paste tables into Word. Excel has a million and one features, but that was the one that mattered to me. I told this story to someone recently, and he said he didn't even know you could do that with Excel. He used it for tracking personal expenses. Everyone who uses Excel has their own needs that may or may not overlap with other users. Everyone's Different 20% There is a broader truth about software usage that follows something like the 80/20 principle: most users will only ever use about 20% of your application's features, but each user uses a different 20%. The writer uses Word for drafting but never touches mail merge. The analyst uses Excel for pivot tables but never for scripting. The PowerPoint user never animates a single object. They are all using a different slice of the same monolithic suite, and each thinks their slice is the most important part. When Microsoft releases new updates to their Office suite, many people get annoyed that their application is now bloated or that their personal workflow is now broken. Why is the application slower? Why are there so many new features that no one cares about? Why does it consume so much mem...