[IxDA Discuss] "The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office"

[Marty DeAngelo]

At the Adaptive Path UXi conference, they spoke almost specifically
about this - the fact that new webapps are coming out that try to give
20% of the functionality that 80% of the users will use instead of being
everything for everybody.  They used Writely as an example (which has
since been bought up by Google) to show that people usually only need a
subset of what is offered in Microsoft Word.  

The presentation made a good point that while those extra features are
interesting and even useful in some situations, many people will never
use them and have trouble finding what they DO need amidst the broad
choices offered.

I for one think that the "Less is More" mentality makes a lot of sense,
because the interfaces get so complicated that even veteran users get
lost going for features that would be somewhere around 26-50 on the
'most used' list.

-- Marty

> Probably unsurprisingly, these numbers appear to show some kind of
"Pareto principle" usage ("20 % of the application commands are used in
80 % of the time"). Does your experience support this?
>
>
> [1] 
> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/most-frequently-used-features
> -in.html
>
> --
> Jens Meiert
> http://meiert.com/en/