steve kwan user experience designer

The 80-20 rule

(February 10th, 2006 - 11:43AM)

According to Wikipedia, the 80-20 rule (aka Pareto's Principle) "states that for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes."

The 80-20 rule is everywhere. Let me give you some examples of the 80-20 rule from my experience in software.

• 80% of bug reports come from 20% of your users.
• 80% of users only use 20% of your system's functionality.
• 80% of your time is spent on 20% of your tasks.

Really, who uses all the features in software products? The 80-20 rule's pretty accurate in this respect; I probably only use 20% of the features in Dreamweaver as I'm writing this post. But surely there are people out there who absolutely love the other 80% of features that I don't even know about.

So if 80% of my users only use 20% of my features, am I better off focusing development on those 20% of commonly used features? Or should I work on the other 80% of relatively unused features, which could lead to a niche market or give me an edge over competitors?

I suppose when you're making business decisions like this, you can choose to make either a "common" product that focuses on the 20%, or a "niche" product that focuses on the 80%.

I think Eloquent makes niche products. There's a tremendous amount of power under the hood of our software, but most of it is likely irrelevant to most users. However, when we do find the odd user who cares about these features, they're amazed.

Perhaps this is something to think about next time you're in a meeting deciding which features are going to make it into the next version. Are we aiming for the 80% or the 20%?