Yahoo! has had a User Interface blog going for a while, and their latest post raises a few interesting items. From the post:

“This was later generalized into what’s commonly referred to as the Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule), which states for any phenomenon, 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. We see this phenomenon in software engineering where 80% of the time is spent in only 20% of the code. When we optimize our applications, we know to focus on that 20% of the code.”

In other words, 80% of the code can be produced in 20% of the allotted time. The remaining 20% of the code - the part that takes the longest to hash out - is where the real work is. That’s where features are smoothed out, and existing code is polished and refined, and page load times are reduced, and pixels are perfectly-aligned, and things are made consistent from page to page, and designs are tweaked to make them better support a user’s work flow, and so on. That’s where things get good.

It’s wonderful that 80% of an application can be created in 20% of the time, because it means we can spend the other 80% of our time making it shine, so that it makes a great first, and lasting, impression.

Posted by Robert on November 29th, 2006