Thursday, February 27, 2014

Discipline: The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle Example
THE PARETO PRINCIPLE
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This is the basic rule of thumb in business, but can also be applied to design and usability. For instance, dramatic improvements can often be achieved by identifying the 20% of users, customers, activities, products or processes that account for the 80% of contribution to profit and maximizing the attention applied to them.

Take for example a simple UI element like a drop-down list of countries presented in a registration form. Most site developers or content creators recognize that 80% of the time, certain countries will be selected. So although it would seemingly be bad practice for such a long list to break the alphabetizing of the list, the 80/20 rule allows that convention to be broken by putting the most selected countries at the top, as shown in the scree-grab below from Fenn Wright Mansonis checkout page.

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