The 80/20 Rule: More Bang for Your UX Research Buck
A fast, powerful way to find your product’s biggest issues
Long, long ago, in the year 2013, I stumbled across an article by Jeff Sauro on the 80/20 rule. After reading his description of conducting Pareto Principle–based user research, I had an epiphany: I realized that I could modify what he was doing to obtain data that my organization had really been struggling to uncover.
What is the Pareto Principle?
In Richard Koch’s book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less, he details how, in 1897, a brilliant researcher named Vilfredo Pareto discovered that the majority of the wealth in England and other countries was predictably controlled by a small minority of the population. Pareto’s research is also known as “the 80/20 rule” and “law of vital few,” among other names.
In the early 1900s, Joseph M. Juran discovered Pareto’s research and realized that the concept also applied to tons of other situations in life: A tiny percentage of criminals caused most crimes, a small percentage of dangerous processes caused a majority of accidents, etc.
He also realized that the concept could be applied to improve consumer and industrial goods. He created a consulting service to work with…
