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Counterpoint: Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth" from 2001. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In

Counterpoint: Joel Spolsky's "Bloatware and the 80/20 myth" from 2001. > Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release “lite” word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the “word count” feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it’s not there, because it’s in the “80% that nobody uses,” and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can’t use this damn thing ’cause it won’t count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

mromanuk 7y ago
Following that example, looks like there is no minimalist general case, but should be possible to achieve a minimal product for journalist, taking into account what they need. By further extending this logic, would be possible to arrange different sets of minimal features for every type of users, or at least cover a majority of those user cases and not force a one size-fits-all approach.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Except it’s much easier to learn how to ignore all the features you don’t necessarily need, than to start learning a completely new product every time one of the features you need isn’t in the one you’re currently using.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    On that matter, it should be possible to re-package the same product but with different UI configurations. I am pretty sure modern IDEs are quite configurable. Why not word processors?
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Because now every repackaging works differently and you need N copies of the same product if one doesn't contain all features you need.
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        This is why a lot of applications provide something like workspaces where you get to pick and choose a UI configuration based on the task at hand. I first saw this in Blender and Eclipse (Blender 2.80 has made this feature more prominent, but it's from the old 1.x days). Maya has this to some extent. Adobe has introduced this in Photoshop and some other products. And all of these programs allow you to come up with your own configurations, too. FreeCAD also has this kind of concept, but there the workspaces are actually pretty much corresponding to UI modes, even though you can switch bith independently. The worst outlier here is Visual Studio. It has this kind of concept internally and keeps different UI configurations for editing and debugging. But you get zero control over that as a user. The UI switch when entering/leaving the debugger is hardcoded.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Sure. But workspaces are a way for the user to refocus the UI on particular family of features. But all other features are not gone; they're still there in the program. Depending on the feature type, some may be accessible through menus and could be included into workspace on demand by changing some options.
        heavenlyblue 7y ago
        So what's the problem with having those features if we are focusing on the fact that only the presence of them in the UI may make the it more distracting?
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        The article we're discussing argues for removing features, not merely their UI indicators. As for the justification for keeping rarely used features somewhere in the UI anyway, a minimally familiar user will be able to ignore currently unused features faster than they'll be able to find hidden features when they're needed. Human vision has an amazing ability to filter and focus.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  Normally the solution everyone gets then is that the products particular users need is done via some sort of plugin system, and then because the menu shouldn't get too bloated you have a plugins entry on the menu, and then the user has to click that, and then click the journalist entry, and then probably some other plugin specific entry that will be different from every other plugin writers' entries - something like Text functions (because probably the Journalist plugin was written by a programmer somewhere who thinks Text functions is totally a great name to put the little atomic functions that do stuff with text in) - to get to the word count entry. And the installation process for these plugins is going to be arduous and mind-numbing too. Why, yes, I have used eclipse before! How did you know?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 7y ago
How would word count not be part of a minimalist WP? Did it have cut-and-paste capabilities? A spellchecker? Aiming for 20% is fine, but the final product must still hit the basic features everyone expects.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I don't think this implies that there's five distinct groups of users that each use an independent set of 20% (for a total of 100%) -- such that all features implemented are mission critical. Not everyone has an identical 20% --that part I can follow and agree with-- but surely a single user's feature usage overlaps substantially with many other users. Maybe there's a core 15%, and a few users customize the last 5%. All in all, maybe it's more 30-70 vs. 20-80. It probably depends on the product in question, but I think this overestimates the length of the longtail, and the overall distribution of usage of product features.
- izacus 7y ago
  While this is true, the non-overlapping parts are easily the one that drive decision making. E.g. anectodal - We've passed on Google Drive enterprise usage in favour of Dropbox on several companies because they don't support Linux. Even though the majority of machines at those companies were macs and only a few of them were Linux machines, the lack of that feature led to a loss of a whole purchase order. Even though the "stats" only show that there's a few % of Linux users.
punnerud 7y ago
I feel the ‘solution’ MS Word, Excel, Chrome, SQL Developer ++ have taken on this is to give the user the bare minimum that everyone need to begin with and hidden all the features. This way they get the best from both worlds. The difficult part is how to group those hidden features together.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Don't think about this in terms of hiding features. That isn't the goal. The task is to put them somewhere in the UI wherentheyncan be explored and discovered while not being prominent. Hiding implies that features cannot be discovered by exploring the UI, which os rarely a good thing.
  - dahauns 7y ago
    It might be an unpopular opinion, but IMO the MS Ribbon UI is still one of the best examples of this kind of UI (at least in a somewhat current incarnation).
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      My main criticism of the ribbon is how it radically changes its structure when the window is resized. This creates menus out of formerly top level elements etc. Thus, Word at half screen width is a radically different UI than at full width. Then there are these almost invisible buttons next to the bottom group labels. Some features are hidden behind those but there is no good visual indication that these buttons open dialogs related to features the group. So I am not totally convinced that they are the best in this field.
JohnFen 7y ago
This is a problem that I've been increasingly encountering with software -- it's become so "lean" that it starts omitting features that are critical to me. When I mention it, I'm told that telemetry indicated that it wasn't used enough, so it was eliminated. Fine, but that means that such software is now useless to me. I have a hard time believing that I am an exception and am the only one encountering this problem, and I'd be willing to bet that the features that others consider "critical" are not the same as the ones that are critical to me. This whole trend is a race to the bottom.
- ProfessorLayton 7y ago
  Agreed! I'm going to sound old and cranky for a bit but Apple has been doing this with OSX for a while now. Random examples: - Preview no longer allows you to pan around documents by holding the space bar. I guess not enough people used that feature because they view documents on their Macbooks, and nobody at Apple Uses non-magic mice. Ugh. - Dashboard (I know I'm waay the minority here). It's going away in favor of Notification Center. Its replacement on the right side of the screen is so much worse because I have to choose between viewing my notifications or the widgets, when I currently do not. I currently still use dashboard to take super quick notes, and unit conversions and calculations. IMO Dashboard in it's soon-to-be-deprecated state was a great idea that was never refined and should have been integrated with the App Store. Seemingly I'm the only person I know that uses Hot Corners with Mission Control, and if that goes away I don't know what I'll do.

mromanuk 7y ago

Following that example, looks like there is no minimalist general case, but should be possible to achieve a minimal product for journalist, taking into account what they need. By further extending this logic, would be possible to arrange different sets of minimal features for every type of users, or at least cover a majority of those user cases and not force a one size-fits-all approach.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
Except it’s much easier to learn how to ignore all the features you don’t necessarily need, than to start learning a completely new product every time one of the features you need isn’t in the one you’re currently using.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  On that matter, it should be possible to re-package the same product but with different UI configurations. I am pretty sure modern IDEs are quite configurable. Why not word processors?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Because now every repackaging works differently and you need N copies of the same product if one doesn't contain all features you need.
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      This is why a lot of applications provide something like workspaces where you get to pick and choose a UI configuration based on the task at hand. I first saw this in Blender and Eclipse (Blender 2.80 has made this feature more prominent, but it's from the old 1.x days). Maya has this to some extent. Adobe has introduced this in Photoshop and some other products. And all of these programs allow you to come up with your own configurations, too. FreeCAD also has this kind of concept, but there the workspaces are actually pretty much corresponding to UI modes, even though you can switch bith independently. The worst outlier here is Visual Studio. It has this kind of concept internally and keeps different UI configurations for editing and debugging. But you get zero control over that as a user. The UI switch when entering/leaving the debugger is hardcoded.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Sure. But workspaces are a way for the user to refocus the UI on particular family of features. But all other features are not gone; they're still there in the program. Depending on the feature type, some may be accessible through menus and could be included into workspace on demand by changing some options.
        heavenlyblue 7y ago
        So what's the problem with having those features if we are focusing on the fact that only the presence of them in the UI may make the it more distracting?
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        The article we're discussing argues for removing features, not merely their UI indicators. As for the justification for keeping rarely used features somewhere in the UI anyway, a minimally familiar user will be able to ignore currently unused features faster than they'll be able to find hidden features when they're needed. Human vision has an amazing ability to filter and focus.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Normally the solution everyone gets then is that the products particular users need is done via some sort of plugin system, and then because the menu shouldn't get too bloated you have a plugins entry on the menu, and then the user has to click that, and then click the journalist entry, and then probably some other plugin specific entry that will be different from every other plugin writers' entries - something like Text functions (because probably the Journalist plugin was written by a programmer somewhere who thinks Text functions is totally a great name to put the little atomic functions that do stuff with text in) - to get to the word count entry. And the installation process for these plugins is going to be arduous and mind-numbing too. Why, yes, I have used eclipse before! How did you know?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sandworm101 7y ago

How would word count not be part of a minimalist WP? Did it have cut-and-paste capabilities? A spellchecker? Aiming for 20% is fine, but the final product must still hit the basic features everyone expects.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

I don't think this implies that there's five distinct groups of users that each use an independent set of 20% (for a total of 100%) -- such that all features implemented are mission critical. Not everyone has an identical 20% --that part I can follow and agree with-- but surely a single user's feature usage overlaps substantially with many other users. Maybe there's a core 15%, and a few users customize the last 5%. All in all, maybe it's more 30-70 vs. 20-80. It probably depends on the product in question, but I think this overestimates the length of the longtail, and the overall distribution of usage of product features.

izacus 7y ago
While this is true, the non-overlapping parts are easily the one that drive decision making. E.g. anectodal - We've passed on Google Drive enterprise usage in favour of Dropbox on several companies because they don't support Linux. Even though the majority of machines at those companies were macs and only a few of them were Linux machines, the lack of that feature led to a loss of a whole purchase order. Even though the "stats" only show that there's a few % of Linux users.

punnerud 7y ago

I feel the ‘solution’ MS Word, Excel, Chrome, SQL Developer ++ have taken on this is to give the user the bare minimum that everyone need to begin with and hidden all the features. This way they get the best from both worlds. The difficult part is how to group those hidden features together.

gmueckl 7y ago
Don't think about this in terms of hiding features. That isn't the goal. The task is to put them somewhere in the UI wherentheyncan be explored and discovered while not being prominent. Hiding implies that features cannot be discovered by exploring the UI, which os rarely a good thing.
- dahauns 7y ago
  It might be an unpopular opinion, but IMO the MS Ribbon UI is still one of the best examples of this kind of UI (at least in a somewhat current incarnation).
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    My main criticism of the ribbon is how it radically changes its structure when the window is resized. This creates menus out of formerly top level elements etc. Thus, Word at half screen width is a radically different UI than at full width. Then there are these almost invisible buttons next to the bottom group labels. Some features are hidden behind those but there is no good visual indication that these buttons open dialogs related to features the group. So I am not totally convinced that they are the best in this field.

JohnFen 7y ago

This is a problem that I've been increasingly encountering with software -- it's become so "lean" that it starts omitting features that are critical to me. When I mention it, I'm told that telemetry indicated that it wasn't used enough, so it was eliminated. Fine, but that means that such software is now useless to me. I have a hard time believing that I am an exception and am the only one encountering this problem, and I'd be willing to bet that the features that others consider "critical" are not the same as the ones that are critical to me. This whole trend is a race to the bottom.

ProfessorLayton 7y ago
Agreed! I'm going to sound old and cranky for a bit but Apple has been doing this with OSX for a while now. Random examples: - Preview no longer allows you to pan around documents by holding the space bar. I guess not enough people used that feature because they view documents on their Macbooks, and nobody at Apple Uses non-magic mice. Ugh. - Dashboard (I know I'm waay the minority here). It's going away in favor of Notification Center. Its replacement on the right side of the screen is so much worse because I have to choose between viewing my notifications or the widgets, when I currently do not. I currently still use dashboard to take super quick notes, and unit conversions and calculations. IMO Dashboard in it's soon-to-be-deprecated state was a great idea that was never refined and should have been integrated with the App Store. Seemingly I'm the only person I know that uses Hot Corners with Mission Control, and if that goes away I don't know what I'll do.