80 is the magic number
When striving for efficiency there’s a number you should keep in mind: 80. Remember that and make it your best bud.
There are three use cases where the number 80 is extremely helpful:
- The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle
- The 80% principle (or as I call it, the ‘stop-creating-and-share’ principle)
- The 5/80 usability test approach
1 — Pareto-up your day
The Pareto principle states that 20% of your activities will impact 80% of your results.
You can apply the Pareto principle to your daily action list: take a piece of paper and write down your ten tasks for the day. Then ask yourself: If you could only accomplish one of the goals on that list today, which one goal would have the greatest impact?
Then pick the second most important goal.
What you’ll find is, after you complete this exercise, you will have determined the most important 20% of your goals that will help you more than anything else, they’ll account for (roughly) 80% of your goals.
Resist the temptation to clear up small things first. Eat the biggest frog first.
2 — Stop creating!
After a deep insight phase — sometimes — we tend to get lost into the creative process. We have a clear idea (or ideas) of what we’re creating (a logo, a visual identity, a publication, a presentation, a website etc.) and we can’t stop testing options and refining our drafts, aiming to a 100% finished product and forgetting to share our drafts along the way, with our coworkers.
You need to stop before that happens! Create quickly and get to about 80% of your drafts. The detail level that makes you happy enough to share them for feedback. The threshold that prevents you to go crazy and making it too hard to kill your darlings (=get rid of some design concepts).
An artist once said: “I consider my painting finished only when I sell it”.
Don’t be that guy.
3 — Test with five, get more than 80 back
When running a user experience design process (for any digital experience you might be designing: an app, a website, a platform, a game etc.) you might get to a point where it makes sense to run a usability test with some users to detect usability problems or pain points. You can then focus your attention in solving those frustrating steps of the experience, redesign your interface or prototype and improve the digital experience of the platform you’re working on.
As the Nielsen Norman diagram illustrates, you can identify roughly 85% of all the usability problems by testing with only five users.
A relative small effort for a very significant result.
To recap:
- Eat the frog first. Prioritise the important tasks, not the small ones;
- Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for sufficient quality, then share;
- Test on five users, get 85% data back.
