The 80/20 rule’s application in UX

The Pareto Principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, has massive implications everywhere. From sectors like Technology and Sales to everyday tasks like Time Management. Originally introduced as a concept in Economics as the Pareto’s Law, it was expounded by a business strategist into a more diverse, Pareto’s Principle.

There’s a 4-line definition you can find right now on Google; in simple words, however, the principle states that in any given task, 80% of the desired outcome will have resulted from only 20% of the input.

An elaboration. It must be noted that this is no hard-and-fast rule. The 80/20 is just a rough figure. More than a mathematical rule, the Pareto Principle is a “pattern”, a phenomenon, that just happens to naturally exist in various aspects of strategy. The “80” doesn’t actually mean “80%”, in a true sense it denotes the word “majority”.

In that sense, “the majority (very roughly 80%) of attention while reading this blog will be given to just a little portion (very roughly 20%) of the content in it.

The 80/20 rule & UX. UX is all about strategy and development, all of which is done to achieve a perfect design. Here, a perfect design is one that shows no errors, functions smoothly, and decreases the time it takes a user to operate the product.

UX in digital products is based heavily on automation. Imagine how tedious banking was before calculators were invented; all of those complicated mathematical equations being done by hand. With the invention of calculators, automation happened, and 80% of the work (calculations) was reduced to 20% of the effort (entering numbers).

A real-life example to show you the real-world application of this principle:

• Background: Recently, our company, WTM Design Lab, received a project from a Roadways Transporter. The company operates a fleet of trucks used by hired drivers. These drivers take trips that are almost always well over a day-long, which means that they have to make stops, take naps & food breaks, as per their personal requirement, as long as they meet deadlines.
• Problem: The issue was that these drivers had to constantly maintain logs and enter data into log sheets manually every time they stopped. This data included start/stop timestamps, distance traveled, break times, fuel economy, overtime if any, etc. Drivers had a fixed number of hours they had to work in a day. Exceeding that time limit was counted as overtime. The drivers then also had to make notes of the overtime hours and incorporate them in their logs. This resulted in a complicated procedure that was likely to cause inaccuracies.
  
  The problem did not end here. After the completion of every trip, the managers had to enter all this data once more into their databases manually, with reference to the log sheets they received from hundreds of drivers.
  All of this data entering, calculation & compilation, plus the additional snag of manually handling paperwork was extremely tedious and time-consuming.
• Solution: We designed a mobile application and dashboard to automate this whole process. The calculation and the database maintenance were now made entirely automatic. Instead of handling paper log sheets, and making calculations, the drivers’ task was reduced to just pressing a “Start/Stop” button on their mobile apps.
  
  Before beginning their journey, the drivers just had to press the “Start” button and then press the “Stop” button when they took a break. The app would automatically make note of the timestamps and make the required calculations.
  Moreover, this data would also reach their managers at the same time as it was stored on the cloud, further reducing a step in this procedure. 80% of the work could now be done by making just 20% of the effort.

Some other things we factored in while designing the app allowed us to increase its versatility, and make it into a “master” app.

• One of the things we noted was that the truck drivers were unlikely to be well-versed with technology. The app had to be crisp and very minimalistic. So we focused more on the UX part of the app, than on the UI part, i.e., instead of looking pretty, it was more important for the app to be exceptionally simple to use.
• The drivers were eligible for 20 paid vacations in a year. We also digitized the process by which the drivers applied for these leaves and made them accessible on the app.
• Also, the managers could access the database through the dashboard. The hard copies were discarded in this process and a single manager could access the soft copies of the data on the application’s digital dashboard.

The significance. What this case study signifies is how exactly the 80/20 rule applies to UX. User Experience is itself a science that concerns itself with making products easier to operate. When 80% of the work can be done by making 20% of the effort, the UX design is successful.

Our design experts are very familiar with the 80/20 rule and keep it in mind when designing UX solutions. Need a consult on UX Design? Schedule a 30-minute call with us here.