9 ms·
Users only care about 20% of your application
- rpigab 1y agoThat's fine, I care about 0% of my users.
- faeyanpiraat 1y agowhy though
- rpigab 1y agoThey never use the software the way I intended them to. I should get rid of all of them. No users = no bugs.
- faeyanpiraat 1y agoWell, if you code stuff for your own use, or just for the enjoyment of coding, then this is completely valid.
- nenenejej 1y agoI 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).
- mrweasel 1y agoCompanies 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".
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoIt 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.
- johannes1234321 1y agoIt is a lot simpler to count the opposite. Working with styles is relatively complicated (not hard, but distinct form pure wysiwyg picking font&size and hoc) and for most small documents doesn't have much of a benefit in the result. For larger documents or professional work it's relevant, but by then people are used to adhoc ways
- bux93 1y agoStyles are also b0rken in interesting ways. Have you ever tried to change the default style to justified, and headings to left-aligned? How does that work out for you in tables? Table styles in general lack all kinds of support. Auto-numbering in headings can theoretically be customized, but good luck trying to change it without following a step-by-step guide that ends up with the default numbering. Using styles is supposed to negate the need for empty lines, but the space-before and space-after properties are buggy, meaning you end up just putting an enter anyway. Empty lines also end up in headings since word often, but not always, understands that the 'enter' pressed after a heading should start a new 'normal' paragraph, rather than a mult-line heading. The keep-together, keep-with-next properties on tables/rows work only kind-of, rather than consistently. Good luck autonumbering tables, illustrations and such. Not to mention that if you work on a word document that has had its styles changed a few times, there's a lot of invisible vestigial stuff in there that will interfere with your new styles. It makes you yearn for latex and xsl-fo(!).
- eszed 1y agoYup. Yup yup yup. Years ago (so I'm open to the idea that it's got better in the last decade or so - but if we're talking about Office, I will doubt your assertion) I used styles religiously, because I was a younger man who took pride in doing things The Right Way. Eventually, however, the number of times styles screwed themselves (or so it seemed) up eventually exceeded my patience, or my time available, to debug them. Now, I do it ad hoc, and haven't had page three look significantly different than page twelve in years. If you want me to do it The Right Way, make sure that's a happy path, or I'm going to stop doing it.
- cjs_ac 1y agoUsers 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.
- XorNot 1y agoBut the thing is, being scared of something breaking is something we as software engineers have pushed onto users. You click a control and something happens - you don't like it, but you don't know what turns it off or undoes it. There's no global state rollback. It's like the sheer terror those "don't show me this again" buttons instill - the concept is frightening even if I'm kind of annoyed by the message, and they rarely if ever include an explanation of exactly where to do to turn the control back on.
- bux93 1y agoAnd this is only becoming worse in recent years. "Contact your administrator", "We are working on updates.." - I recently spent 10 minutes trying to find the actual location a powerpoint was saved to since every iteration of 'open location'/'open in sharepoint'/'copy link' just resulted in URLs with GUIDs or opening the document again rather than an actual path.
- thewebguyd 1y agoThat fear is very real, and I've noticed it on my team at work. Our (internal) help desk ticket work load has increased quite a bit over the past ~5 years or so, even though our user base hasn't changed much. People are even afraid to do basic troubleshooting out of fear of breaking something and not being able to easily rollback to the point that something as simple changing the sleep settings on a computer results in a help desk ticket.
- nubg 1y ago[flagged]
- juliangmp 1y agoUh, did you open the link at all?
- defraudbah 1y ago[flagged]
- themafia 1y ago> 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.
- card_zero 1y agoPluralism, huh. I suppose this applies to games, too, the different ways people enjoy the same game.
- worthless-trash 1y agoUsers dont care about 1% of my application, lets be real.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI've found that I'm not so good at anticipating how my work will be used, so I tend to "pave the bare spots"[0]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/#paving https://littlegreenviper.com/the-road-most-traveled-by/#pavi...
- cheschire 1y agoDesire paths are how I recommend IT policy and governance is written too. 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoVery much so. It can probably be scaled to a degree, via structure and process. I’m not a huge fan of the CMMI, but Level 5 prescribes pretty much exactly that, though applied to the production process, as opposed to the end product.
- hshshshshsh 1y agoYeah. But they can you have enough money to fix that. Problem is most users don't even make it to that point and over engineer.
- bmacho 1y agoThis is just telemetry but IRL and no way to opt out. You can maybe hop in someone else's footsteps if you are not the first.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThat's very true. I worked for a company that was known for doing what others have done, but better. That's sort of Apple's philosophy, as well. Anyone can walk through a minefield, as long as they're patient, and don't mind walking past a lot of body parts. Omaha Beach was a nightmare on D-Day, but a lot less challenging, in the next few days.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 1y agoThis should really credit Joel Spolsky somewhere: 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...
- CodesInChaos 1y agoPretty similar article to some old Spolsky blogposts: 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... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoIt’s very similar to the second one (Simplicity). 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.
- raincole 1y agoIt's crazy how well Joel Spolsky's works aged. 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 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.
- Hendrikto 1y ago> today's mighty 5080 Consumer GPUs really are not where the money is. It’s only a tiny fraction of Nvidia’s revenue, and much lower margin. Datacenter GPUs are where the volume and margins are.
- deeringc 1y agoI would have expected that consumer GPUs still have higher volume, but that Datacenter GPUs have much, much higher margin and therefore significantly higher revenue and profit. Is that not the case?
- newsclues 1y agoWhat percentage of an app do power users care about?
- throawayonthe 1y ago15
- defraudbah 1y ago[flagged]
- newsclues 1y agoWhy?
- Minor49er 1y agoHe doesn't even have enough karma to downvote
- defraudbah 1y agoyeah, then who downvoted you both?
- api 1y agoFor different users it can be a different 20%
- benrutter 1y agoNot sure if you read the article, but that's exactly its main point!
- colonwqbang 1y ago80% of HN users read only 20% of the article before writing their comment.
- latexr 1y agoThat’s the thesis of the article. Hard to miss even when skimming, as it’s in very large letters near the top.
- atoav 1y agoI guess most people don't care about our applications at all. They care about how it solves a problem they want or need to have solved. That is the starting point. You can get people to care if your application becomes a great tool for the things they want to do. And good tools don't get in your way.
- benrutter 1y ago> Slack works similarly with its integrations. Discord does this with bots and servers. The platform provides the foundation, but users craft their own experience on top of it. Not really the articles core point, but to me at least, those two products are full of loads of stuff I don't want! I thought VS code was a good example, I'm curious about if anyone has other examples that they think do modularity well?
- lawn 1y agoI'd say Emacs and Neovim fit the mold even better than VS code. By themselves they're quite bare but with plugins, addons, and your own configuration they can become anything you want (and more!).
- SoftTalker 1y agoI suppose the core of emacs is pretty minimal but in practice the number of packages that it includes by default is pretty large.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoI thought VS Code was a terrible example: don't 100% of VS Code users use the code editing pane? 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.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago“ your software will be used in ways you never imagined.” This is actually a lot of fun to discover.
- ltbarcly3 1y agoIf only they could agree on what 20% so we wouldn't have to build the rest. No I didn't read the article but the punchline is trivially obvious.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoThere's a marketing corollary that is called the Modified Pareto. Briefly that it's not 80/20 but 60/20. That is 20% of the heaviest or power users will consume 60% of the product. But that means the 80% will actually consume 40%. That's no longer small enough to ignore, so you have to cater to the light or infrequent user. https://marketingscience.info/value-paretos-bottom-80/ https://marketingscience.info/value-paretos-bottom-80/
- atoav 1y agoIt is always interesting to view such principles as part of iterative feedback loop rather than the truthism it is: 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.
- ryangibb 1y agoThis is a good argument for the Unix philosophy's "do one thing" to avoid the bloat the author describes. E.g. vi, sendmail, and some bash for Word's mail merge. Or Emacs and some lisp. But then the onus is on the user to compose these tools to something that solves their particular problem.
- oneeyedpigeon 1y agoI almost commented the same, but I think the tricky bit is that it still holds: users only care about 20% of vi, etc.
- psychoslave 1y ago99% hardship of any advanced tool that is expected to be used by any random person is in integration, discoverability, fault tolerance, pragmatic relevant guidance. 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".
- pjmlp 1y agoThey also care 0% of how it was written, unless it stands on their way, hence why nowadays we have applications of various quality levels, when looking under the hood.
- CodeCompost 1y agoI didn't read the article but in my experience, 80% of the application are parts that you rarely touch, config stuff and "LEFT JOIN" stuff. There is always one or two parts where all data comes together and that is the heart of your application. Yeah those are the parts your users care about and pay you to make.
- filleduchaos 1y agoIt's against the rules to say this, but it would definitely help to actually read the article.
- CodeCompost 1y agoOk
- davedx 1y ago> Kagi didn't need to beat Google for everyone; they just needed to serve that specific slice of users perfectly. They focused on being the ideal 20% for people whose 20% Google was ignoring. Yes, this is actually a critical insight into how to find product-market fit
- carlosjobim 1y agoWhen it comes to Kagi, I would guess that it is a better alternative for more than 90% of Google search users. The only thing making it niche is that it's a paid product competing with free.
- didip 1y agoWhen it comes to Kagi, it just needs to be the old Google. Something that new Google abandoned.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoYes, search as it was before enshittification.
- rpastuszak 1y agoI like to call this approach MISS (MISS – Make It Stupid, Simple) or better: Make It Stupid Simple, To Experience Revenue = M.I.S.S.T.E.R. i.e. keep removing features until the idea fits in your head, the value can be explained concisely to a small group of people to whom it'll just 'click'. https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/miss-make-it-stupid-simple/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/miss-make-it-stupid-simple/
- oidar 1y agoI love your blog. As an aside, on OBEY - I also love smoking and have quit - except for one time - for years now. And a thing that's helped immensely, is just sitting and becoming comfortable with the idea that I will always want cigarettes. It's just biology. When I tried to do things like to distract myself, like your suggestions in OBEY, the desire became stronger. So, my suggestion is to lean into the discomfort of not having something you want. Or wanting something, and deciding not to take it.
- chrisrickard 1y agoThis is why AI development will be huge in the “Buy vs Build” space… Businesses (with a capable tech team)can build the 20% of the SaaS they need, and stop paying for the 80% every single month.
- nradov 1y agoAnd then they'll later find out there is a critical group of internal users who was using way more than 20% of the SaaS and roll-out of the replacement application is blocked. Whoops.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoI kinda miss the unix philosophy... one tool for one job. A PDF reader should read PDFs, there's no need for it to have its own (possibly paid) cloud service and an AI chat bot. I do get why some integrations are beneficial (eg. office software with text editing, spreadsheets and a database, so you can generate eg. letters with data from a database, etc... but every service needing its own cloud and adding a useless AI chatbot is just a useless overkill for me.
- mushufasa 1y agothe counterpoint is that unix itself is a holistic system -- the value of unix is the integration of a bunch of different tools by providing a consistent way to manipulate streams of text and files with standardization
- data-ottawa 1y agoI think you have the wrong model for apps. Doing one thing is almost always having the full document CRUD loop. 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.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoAn under-explored integration type, IMO, is the concept of interchangeable parts. I like having an integrated PDF reader inside my browser. Problem is, my external pdf-reader is substantially better than the pdf reader in my browser. Wouldn't it be nice if I could embed the external reader, replacing my browser's reader? Or one that I've actually hacked into a few contexts already: What if every multi-line text field could be replaced by a neovim buffer?
- tnolet 1y agoVery true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.
- mackman 1y agoAs best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.
- xnorswap 1y agoThe best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion. It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter. You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
- tnolet 1y agoEven if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct. They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.
- xnorswap 1y agoAre you talking about structural fundamentals or product features? Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about: - SSO / SAML / auth integrations - ISO Certifications - Regular Pen tests - Localisation support - APIs ( that they'll never use ) - Bulk operations - Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting ) Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not. But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers. Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for: " This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ". You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine. That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.
- r_singh 1y agoWith AI type tools though it’s more likely than ever that the 20% each user group cares about is a different aspect / feature of your application
- nottorp 1y agoYes but not all users care about the same 20%.
- oldandboring 1y agoTell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.
- tgv 1y agoI'm building things for internal users, and they are quite demanding. Many features don't get used often (as is obvious), but may be critical for serving different clients. The software is also open to external users, and they really stick to the basics.
- reinvent42 1y ago> 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. Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.
- oblio 1y agoThis is true for folks from the wild and woolly days of... before 2005 (I think?). 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.
- scarface_74 1y agoMy high end Dell that I used for my job at a startup that they let me keep after the startup collapsed in 2010 was a Dell Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 8GB of RAM, a 1920x1280 display (one the last with that beautiful ratio), a 500GB hard drive, Gig E internet, 892.11n and FireWire. I put Windows 10 on it when it was released and used it for a Plex Server until around 2021. It wasn’t until last year that base MacBook Airs came with more than 8GB RAM and they still come with less storage than that. Not to mention that low end PC laptops still come at a lower resolution than my old Dell did.
- Cockbrand 1y agoOh yes, the memories! [Pun not intended] Mine is 880k. Boy, did I squeeze the last bytes out of that Workbench boot floppy!
- magicalhippo 1y agoI recall when we upgraded our 40MB HDD to a mindboggling 210MB drive. I vividly recall booting up, running dir and wondering what on earth I was going to do with all that space. Not a week later I was back to figuring out what to delete to free up some space for a new game...
- oldandboring 1y agoI am reminded of an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry gives his dad an expensive, multifunction PDA called "The Wizard" but his Dad doesn't immediately see the use. Jerry explains it can do all kinds of things, for example, it has a calculator he can use to calculate tips at restaurants, leading Dad to conclude it's a $200 tip calculator. Jerry keeps protesting "it does other things!" and the old folks act like they can't even hear him.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoBut they don't necessarily care about the same 20%. Another thing worth considering is that your users won't actually know what features they are going to get until after they've used the application. Users will install your app not based on what's in the app but based on what they think is going to be in the app after they install it. That's an important distinction. All that hard work you are doing on features won't actually pay off until after you convince people to use the app. This is especially important when you are trying to make an MVP. Lack of features is almost never the problem that prevents users from installing and staying in your app. Usually the actual issues are with your messaging, marketing, etc. Or maybe your app doesn't do anything that actually interests users. Whatever it is, your feature set probably has nothing to do with it. Adding more features won't solve these issues either. This sounds simple but I've seen companies get this wrong. The simplest MVP is simply trying to get users to sign up before you even have anything implemented. It's a common pattern to validate ideas. The best confirmation that your messaging is right is users getting disappointed after they sign up. That's still bad but now at least you know that at least the messaging is right and that you can convince people that what your selling is worth having. This of course leads to another issue: launching your app before it is a proper MVP for whatever your messaging promises. If you promise lots of things that aren't actually there, you are probably setting people up to be disappointed at least somewhat. A related point here is that many features are nice to haves that are hard to monetize because they aren't that essential. Especially with SAAS applications there are usually a lot of nice to haves that people don't actually want to pay for. Treating your customer wishes as requirements is going to need a lot of scrutiny. Do they actually value what they get? Would they pay for it? Does it solve some important pain point? Etc. It's more important to understand why they ask for stuff than to exactly deliver what they ask for.
- Sharlin 1y ago> But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%. That’s kind of the article’s main point.
- dansmith1919 1y ago> But they don't necessarily care about the same 20%. Did you write that entire comment based on the headline only?
- hansvm 1y agoAt one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few customization options), every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about.
- ozim 1y agoThat’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. 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.
- radlad 1y agoThe parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoWasn't this the same argument which Evernote made for its bloatedness. Evernote’s 5% problem offers a cautionary lesson to tech companies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10842679
- ozim 1y agoThat doesn’t mean feature paid itself off if you invest with idea that it will be useful for more than 1/5 of users and when feature brings single customer and is marginally useful for other customers. Then also you have ongoing costs of maintaining the feature that no one usually accounts for. Even if customer participated financially into creating the feature when they leave you are left with maintenance.
- lo_fye 1y agoYes, but many of them care about different twenty-percentses, so you probably still need the whole thing to keep the number of users you currently have. BUT if you can find a feature that few people use, but which requires a lot of maintenance and/or ongoing development time, get rid of that bit and enjoy a higher ROI.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BinaryIgor 1y agoThat's why is so crucial for any great product (or striving to be) to have reliable usage metrics - you then have reliable data to decide what's worth focusing on and improving and what's not so much
- throwmeaway222 1y ago20%? I imagine most of us use 0.1% of Jira. And it's the same 0.1% for all users in the org. The app is massive, millions of lines of code and we're effectively using like 60 SQL statements that run within it. create issue, edit issue, move issue, update issue status, close sprint, repeat
- tuna74 1y agoWhy don't you use something cheaper then?
- throwmeaway222 1y agoYes! I have asked the management that question at the last 4 companies I was at. The answer is always the same - its what everyone is used to.
- thomastjeffery 1y agoMore interestingly, users care about 20% of each of the other applications they are trying to use. Not only is it frustrating for them to be bombarded with the 80% of your app they don't care about, it's frustrating when they can't easily replace that 80% with the other apps they prefer. The entire premise of an "application" is, in my opinion, a huge mistake. Each application, by virtue of being just that, is designed to be a silo of functionality and usability. An application monopolizes the functionality for the use case it was designed to apply to. Not only does an application hold its functionality hostage, it insulates itself from the functionality of other applications. This creates a brittle system with incredible overhead. There's a reason many of us prefer to use a terminal emulator and shell utilities: they are designed with the opposite goal, to collaborate with each other as much as possible. That's often worth dealing with the ~40 years of cruft that the shell comes with, but accessibility could definitely be improved.
- renegat0x0 1y agoWhoa. That is 20% more than I thought
- isk517 1y agoWhile hitting 100% utilization will probably never happen in any significantly large application, in my experience almost every application has a good 10-30% of it that remains unused because they are extremely unintuitive to anyone who isn't on the development team, has a absolutely awful and inefficient workflow, or is so basic that it would only be of value to companies that would in no way be able to afford that application in the first place.
- sharkjacobs 1y agoI made a little hobbyist app for myself, and I think it's pretty nice and occasionally think about polishing it up and releasing it. And the first reason I don't is because I'm not interested in promoting it, and it's pretty pointless to release to no one. But the much bigger reason is because I'm not interested in implementing the remaining 80% that I don't use myself.
- kccqzy 1y agoI also made several hobbyist apps for myself. Sometimes I thought what if I just posted it as a Show HN, but I am just rarely in the mood for implementing features others ask for, outside of work which pays me enough that I'd oblige.
- conductr 1y agoIt's been 25 years now but this exact thing is why I switched majors away from CS in college, I decided back then that I didn't want an employer/client telling me what to build. I liked software as a hobby but think it would have been a miserable profession (for me, not projecting to anyone else).
- lomase 1y agoI made one plugin for myself and released open source in github. The amount of, sometimes hostile, request I had to implement stuff I did not care made me stop the development.
- SoftTalker 1y agoJust tell them you'll be happy to consider including their patch to provide the missing features, or f-off. I've used a lot of open-source code which up-front says that issues requesting new features will be closed.
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- SoftTalker 1y ago
- einpoklum 1y ago"Your application"? That post talks about Microsoft Office. That's the giant corporation + the government's application. Give LibreOffice as an example if you want to talk about large apps that can be "yours", at least partially. And indeed, we should make sure the apps we write are FOSS, so that those users who care about those various 20%'s feel that its also "their application", and may actually help out - with money or code or time.
- g42gregory 1y agoCorrect, but each may be using different 20%. In the enterprise software (think ERP), each user may be using only 0.01% of the overall functionality. And the entire company maybe using only 1% of the functionality.
- hermitcrab 1y ago>You can't predict exactly which 20% each user will need, but you can build systems that let them find and enhance their own slice. If your users are programmers, engineers or scientists, fine. If your users are not the above, fuhgeddaboudit. You will end up in support hell.
- a4isms 1y agoBack in the days when desktop applications were the thing, I recall a (probably apocryphal) claim that nobody used more than 5% of Microsoft Office, but no two users used the same 5%. So it always appeared to be bloated with features nobody ever used, but actually somebody, somewhere, was using every one of the features. I doubt the number was actually 5% or that usage of features was close to even, but the principal idea seems reasonable. Different users use different subsets of a product.
- imoverclocked 1y agoDebian popcon is an interesting way to judge usage IMO. Of course, not all environments are amenable to sharing usage data but it would be an interesting clause to include in a software license. “Without usage data, we can not guarantee that all features will remain in the software.”
- nextworddev 1y agoYes but you still need those useless features to sell
- listenallyall 1y agonew | threads | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit I only use one of these links regularly, another one occasionally, and the others, if I happen to press it, it was probably a misclick. So about 20% seems like a good approximation.
- tormeh 1y agoI don't think we should chase simplicity/austerity in our products, but we should chase elegance. Ideally, features should compose so their utility multiplies instead of sums. The program should be fast and have a UI that's easy to learn. That kind of thing. There's a difference between being big and being bloated.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoFrom another angle, user doesn't need 80% of your application. This is a key to keep software simple, fast, and convenient to use. The downside (for some) is that because every users's needs are different, software needs to be tweaked and compiled by the end user. Notable example of this approach is suckless' programs[1] such as dwm, dmenu, and st. I also took this philosophy and wrote hat - a hackable text editor[2]. Mostly because tweaking neovim was not a pleasant experience and took more steps than it should. [1]: https://suckless.org/ https://suckless.org/ [2]: https://github.com/ivanjermakov/hat https://github.com/ivanjermakov/hat
- 73189822 1y agoIndeed, it really fits the 80/20 rule.”