The 10% Myth

The is a myth that surrounds the technology arena. The latest time that I read it was in a Boston Globe article on Notes upgrades.

According to The Boston Globe:

Bisconti said admitted that the Lotus office software won’t have all the advanced features of Microsoft Office, but most people rarely use these tools, he added. ”Most customers tell us that 90 percent of my users use 10 percent of the functions,” Bisconti said.

I’d love to be able to say that I have managed to do the research and find out where this myth came from but I can’t. I used to know, but it’s one of those examples where search has a long way to go. If my memory serves me correctly it was some research done by the Microsoft User Interface team and started them down the road of hiding functions that people weren’t using so they could get to the ones they were using quicker.

My experience on the functions that people use is this. Users use a variable amount of the capabilities of large applications like Microsoft Word and most of them only use a small amount of the capabilities that are available to them. But the capabilities they use are different to the capabilities used by the person sat in the cubicle next to them. The way that they do something is different to the way I do it. Adding together all of the capabilities results in a set of capabilities that are all used by someone.

My other experience is that the 10% of users – the power users not in the 90% – use significantly more of the capabilities. It is these individuals who make the other 90% productive and keep encouraging them to increase their productivity.

The Microsoft Office 12/2007 team chose to change the user interface for all of the Office applications because a huge majority of the capabilities they were asked for in Office 12 already existed in Office 2003. It was just that people didn’t know where to find them.