"80/20" and content

"80/20" is a ubiquitous principle (formula, law, etc.) that lends itself to statements such as "80% of a business's performance problems are due to 20% of the employees" and "80% of annual traffic accidents are caused by 20% of a region's drivers". (You can tell I made that last one up, right?)

We even use it in content planning. But before I write about how we apply it, I decided to poke around and find the origins of 80/20.

Wikipedia tells me that the economist Vilfredo Pareto claimed that 80% of property in Italy was owned by 20% of the Italian population. Joseph Juran, a management specialist, extrapolated that ratio into a principle: "for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes." An even clearer explanation puts it this way: "The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many(80 percent) are trivial."

The benefit of thinking about 80/20 is as a guideline for where to concentrate your efforts. So in content planning, it's a rule of thumb for filtering content: does this topic address an issue 80% of our customers are likely to encounter?

You might ask, why does that matter? For the customer, it matters because content they don't want to know is irrelevant and irrelevant content is noise, an obstacle. For us, in addition to doing what's best for the customer, there are limitations such as a time and money. We need to focus our schedule and budget on providing information that will help the largest group of customers.

Of course it isn't exact, rules of thumb never are. Maybe only half our customers will ever do Procedure X - that's more than 20%, let's cover it. But when we come across a scenario that applies to 1 in 10 at best, we flag it for further consideration, because then we need to drill down further on areas such as risk and potential damage and whether there are other ways of dealing with it.

Maybe that's another application...80% of product information ends up in core documentation, 20% is managed separately...?

And now I'm wondering...do 80% of our customers read only 20% (or less) of our content?