Most people will use your software to get work done, unless, of course, you're writing the next hit game, and despite experiences you may have had which might make you wonder, users are fairly intelligent. The saying that no one reads manuals is mostly true: people generally have better things to do than read software manuals except when either in trouble or as bathroom reading. Try to keep in mind how busy most people are and how valuable their time is to them when you are designing your program.

In order to make doing work with your program easier, you need to prioritize what kinds of work they will do in order of how often the work is done. Come up with a list of tasks the user will be doing and put them into one of 3 categories: Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Common tasks, unsurprisingly, are those things which the user does all the time. In a word processor, this would include typing in text, changing font sizes and styles, and adjusting margins. Uncommon tasks are those which the user does just from time to time. Depending on the user, this might be something like printing labels, adding color to a table, or counting the words in the document. Rare tasks are those which are done every once in a great while. Often times, these tasks are ones which the user would quite likely not miss if it were not possible to do it with your program. This would also be the kinds of things that only 20 percent of your users or less would end up using. If you do decide to include features to handle Rare tasks, think carefully about each task's importance in the grand scheme of things before deciding with any finality.

To paraphrase Einstein, you must make your software as simple as possible but no simpler. Complexity must be kept to a minimum. One major way this can be done is by avoiding features which are used only in remote instances -- the tasks in the Rare group. Design your application to meet the needs of 80 percent of your target audience. Features add complexity and complexity adds difficulty.