Users Only Care About 20% of Your Application

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. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually important. After the computer failed to boot, I would have to reinstall Windows and Office 97. My father spent countless hours in the Office Suite and always reminded me to make sure I installed MS Excel. I didn't understand what it was for. The interface looked very confusing to me.

But then one day, I was writing some gibberish in Word and wanted to add a table. I didn't know how to add a table in Word. I asked my father, and he didn't know how to do it in Word either, but he had a trick: if you open Microsoft Excel, you can copy tables from Excel and paste them into Word. So in my mind, the only reason Excel existed was to copy and paste tables into Word.

Excel has a million and one features, but that was the one that mattered to me. I told this story to someone recently, and he said he didn't even know you could do that with Excel. He used it for tracking personal expenses. Everyone who uses Excel has their own needs that may or may not overlap with other users.

Everyone's Different 20%

There is a broader truth about software usage that follows something like the 80/20 principle: most users will only ever use about 20% of your application's features, but each user uses a different 20%.

The writer uses Word for drafting but never touches mail merge. The analyst uses Excel for pivot tables but never for scripting. The PowerPoint user never animates a single object. They are all using a different slice of the same monolithic suite, and each thinks their slice is the most important part.

When Microsoft releases new updates to their Office suite, many people get annoyed that their application is now bloated or that their personal workflow is now broken. Why is the application slower? Why are there so many new features that no one cares about? Why does it consume so much memory?

It's not just that users don't use the other 80%, they may actively resent it for getting in the way of their 20%.

The Search for Perfect Results

This isn't something unique to Microsoft. I often get frustrated with Google Search. Sometimes want to search by exact keywords, but Google will try to find "related words" even when I use double quotes. I understand that for the majority of use cases, people find what they need on Google, or Google wouldn't dominate search like they do today. But that doesn't make my experience any less frustrating.

Complaints like mine often get dismissed as requests from the "1% of users" who want features that won't move the business needle. But 1% of a billion users is still ten million people. Recently, I read a comment from Vlad Prelovac, the CEO of Kagi (a paid search engine focused on quality results without ads or tracking). He realized that Google's small percentage of dissatisfied users (power users tired of SEO spam, privacy-conscious individuals, researchers needing precise results) represented a large, untapped, and potentially profitable market.

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.

Finding Your Neglected Slice

Several disruptive companies were born this way. They identify a segment that a giant is ignoring and cater to them so well that they build a loyal, often profitable, user base. Figma didn't need to replace all of Adobe's creative tools, they just needed to nail collaborative design better than Adobe. Notion didn't need to be the best word processor or the best database, they just needed to be the best hybrid tool for teams that needed both.

As successful software inevitably accumulates features and complexity, it creates gaps. Users whose specific 20% gets buried under layers of "improvements" meant for other users start looking for alternatives. This is where opportunities emerge.

The ability of open-source software to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths here. A developer can take FFmpeg or Blender and create a custom build that strips out everything except the tools needed for a particular workflow. Like a version of Blender optimized solely for architectural visualization.

Building for the Right 20%

You can see this philosophy working beautifully in VS Code. No two person uses VS code the same way. It starts as a simple text editor, everyone's core 20% is roughly the same basic functionality. Then, through extensions, each developer builds their own perfect environment. The base stays lean, but everyone can customize their personal 20% exactly how they want it.

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.

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.

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The goal isn't to build a product that does everything for everyone. That's how you end up with bloated software that frustrates more users than it delights&tm;. The goal is to build a product that does the right thing for each user, even if that means accepting that they'll ignore most of what you've built.

This might seem wasteful, but it's actually liberating. Instead of trying to make every feature appeal to every user, you can focus on making sure each feature works well for the users who actually need it. Instead of fighting feature bloat, you can embrace the idea that your software will be used in ways you never imagined.

By accepting that everyone only partially cares about your software, you can stop trying to make them care about all of it. You can finally start building the part they'll truly love. Even if you're not sure which part that will be.

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