Cater to your top performers
In his Weblog, Perryn Fowler recently advised to “Make it easy to use well, not hard to use badly“. This makes a lot of sense to me and reminds me of another bit of wisdom that I’ve heard from sales people, “cater to your top performers”.
Wisdom from the realm of sales advises sales managers to focus their training budgets on their top sales people. For example, many sales managers will spend their money sending their top sales-people to training seminars, while not training the rest of the sales force. This is beneficial to them because of the 80/20 (aka 70/30 or 90/10) rule: 80 percent of their revenue is produce by the top 20% of their staff. Despite complaints about inequality and unfairness, sales managers realize that it is probably better to send their top performers to a really good week-long sales seminar than to send everybody on the sales team to a mediocre one-day training session. The top performers will get more out of the training, will use more of what they learn, will generate more money for the company, and will “trickle down” the knowledge to the rest of the sales force.
Some discussion has taken place on whether the 80/20 rule applies to software development as well. People like Alistair Cockburn and Fred Brooks talk about similar concepts as well.
Here’s where I think these two concepts merge: make it easy to use well so that your top-developers can be more productive. One could probably make this argument for most aspects of software development: language, tools, API, UI, etc.
There is, however, one case in which I would rephrase Perryn Fowler’s advice. When talking about software that is responsible for human life, I would say that a UI must to be “easy to use well, AND hard to use badly”