It could be called the Word phenomenon, after the popular word processor (which must be one of the most notoriously under-used pieces of software in the history of man-kind). I am talking about the fact that 90 percent of the users of a given product use at best 10% of its functionality.

This rule applies to a large proportion of shrink-wrapped software product on the market, and it amounts to a significant problem: How on earth can you motivate your users to learn about new functionality?

Microsoft Office is of course the most widely known example for this problem, but it hits every other sector of development as well. The reality is that in most cases, we buy software for a small number of required tasks, and we usually have neither time nor willingness to explore unknown functionality, even if it could be very useful.

In a maturing software market, technology providers need to take this issue extremely seriously: as the novelty of technology wears off, the motivation of learning about functionality decreases significantly. And as motivation decreases so does the willingness to pay for upgrades to new releases.

The answer to the problem? Investing more development resources in ergonomics, and less in new features. The ideal: self-teaching software; programs which do not require any learning effort from the user. A big challenge — but there must be more efficient ways than Microsoft’s Wizards to inform users about functionality.