Key takeaways
Find the few features, pages or bugs that account for most of the value or the pain.
Spend most of the effort there.
Origins
The principle is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed around 1896 that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population, and, as the story goes, found a similar split among the peas in his garden. The management thinker Joseph Juran later popularised it as the 80/20 rule. It is a rule of thumb and not an exact law: the real ratio varies from case to case.
In practice
- Look at the analytics: which 20% of the pages get 80% of the visits?
- Fix the usability problems that affect the most users first.
- Cut or postpone the features that almost nobody uses.
Further reading
- The 80/20 Rule in User Experience — Arin Bhowmick | Medium
- Applying the Pareto Principle to the User Experience — Jeff Sauro | Measuring U
- The Pareto Principle and Your User Experience Work — Interaction Design Foundation
- Pareto Principle on Wikipedia — Wikipedia
- Pareto Principle on Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski
The illustration is our own, drawn after the idea of this law’s card in Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski.
