4 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
Companies 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    It 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 ago
      Styles 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 ago
        Yup. 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.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    The only time I bothered with styles was when I was looking to create cohesive documentation for a large team, along with templates to help others create such documents. Ironically, at the time the corporate templates didn’t even use styles. It was just a 5 page doc with all the different things a person might use, and we were expected to copy/paste what we wanted to get the proper formatting. This wasn’t officially stated, but that was the only way I could see to use it.
- zwnow 1y ago
  My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in my area already is notorious, now its even worse.
  - mmmllm 1y ago
    They had the week long delays before this switch :D - now they just found a good excuse
  - nradov 1y ago
    The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.
    - zwnow 1y ago
      Maybe dont employ these people in positions that require a specific way of thinking then...
      - nradov 1y ago
        You're really missing the point. Most clerical jobs don't require that specific way of thinking. Major changes to office productivity applications are quite rare and it would be silly to hire for those jobs based on abstract cognitive abilities. Ability to reliably follow instructions is usually sufficient.
        zwnow 1y ago
        Until... you change the software.
- troupo 1y ago
  With Word especially (and probably with any software approaching anything that can be viewed as professional) the long tail is unbelievably long, and "users only care about 20% of your application" may actually become "users may only care about 20% where no two users share the same 20%". Here's Microsoft's own research on it from an era when people were actually doing research: https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/07/570798.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn... --- start quote --- Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size") --- end quote --- The whole series is great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... and there's a presentation, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk
- BeFlatXIII 1y ago
  > 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". “Knows Word” and “familiar with Windows” are boilerplate résumé spam to match the keyword selection. No one actually is expected to follow up on those bullets.
cjs_ac 1y ago
Users 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 ago
  But 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 ago
    And 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 ago
    That 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.

I 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 ago

Companies 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 ago
It 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Styles 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 ago
      Yup. 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.
- al_borland 1y ago
  The only time I bothered with styles was when I was looking to create cohesive documentation for a large team, along with templates to help others create such documents. Ironically, at the time the corporate templates didn’t even use styles. It was just a 5 page doc with all the different things a person might use, and we were expected to copy/paste what we wanted to get the proper formatting. This wasn’t officially stated, but that was the only way I could see to use it.
zwnow 1y ago
My state (Germany) recently switched away from Microsoft to open source solutions and public offices have week long delays due to employees not finding buttons they were used to. They expect a 1 to 1 copy of the Microsoft product. Training should be software independent. People need to be educated with computer basics, if they work in a field that requires the usage of computers. Having to go to some public office in my area already is notorious, now its even worse.
- mmmllm 1y ago
  They had the week long delays before this switch :D - now they just found a good excuse
- nradov 1y ago
  The type of education in fundamentals that would allow users to flexibly switch between office productivity applications requires a fairly high level of abstract thinking. Not everyone has that cognitive ability. Some struggle with anything more complex than executing a set procedure and would require years of remedial education to break out of that mindset.
  - zwnow 1y ago
    Maybe dont employ these people in positions that require a specific way of thinking then...
    - nradov 1y ago
      You're really missing the point. Most clerical jobs don't require that specific way of thinking. Major changes to office productivity applications are quite rare and it would be silly to hire for those jobs based on abstract cognitive abilities. Ability to reliably follow instructions is usually sufficient.
      - zwnow 1y ago
        Until... you change the software.
troupo 1y ago
With Word especially (and probably with any software approaching anything that can be viewed as professional) the long tail is unbelievably long, and "users only care about 20% of your application" may actually become "users may only care about 20% where no two users share the same 20%". Here's Microsoft's own research on it from an era when people were actually doing research: https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/07/570798.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20080329042649/http://blogs.msdn... --- start quote --- Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size") --- end quote --- The whole series is great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... and there's a presentation, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiNeUTgGkk
BeFlatXIII 1y ago
> 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". “Knows Word” and “familiar with Windows” are boilerplate résumé spam to match the keyword selection. No one actually is expected to follow up on those bullets.

cjs_ac 1y ago

Users 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 ago
But 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 ago
  And 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 ago
  That 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.