Using the 80 percent rule when developing optimal settings

A popular design rule, often called the Pareto principle in honor of the Italian economist who popularized the concept, is a fundamental theory on an 80 percent-20 percent ratio. The basic concept behind the principle is that for a system with a large number of occurring events, often 80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the system's cause variables.

With interface design, this rule is often embodied in the idea that for any application, 80 percent of a user's time will be spent using only 20 percent of the app's features. Many applications tend to follow this trend, with some even seeing ratios as high as 90 percent or more of all time in app spent on 20 percent of features.

In this recipe, we'll discuss how to cut down on options or features in order to best create a piece of work optimized for this principle.

Getting ready

For this recipe, it will be useful to have some sort of beta testing program planned out...