10 Ways to Improve Usability When You Thought it Was Too Late(usabilityfriction.com)
usabilityfriction.com
10 Ways to Improve Usability When You Thought it Was Too Late
http://usabilityfriction.com/2008/11/05/10-ways-to-improve-usability-when-you-thought-it-was-too-late/
Firstly, regarding the 80/20 rule -- sure, only 20% of your features are used 80% of the time, but it's rarely the same 20%. That's why Microsoft Office has so much cruft.
Regarding fields for MAC addresses, etc, how do you handle credit cards? The standard is currently to have a single textbox, and it's what people are used to. Shifting that to a split box model introduces all sorts of other problems. A smarter option is to have good input handling (that strips out spaces, dashes, etc)
Splitting out forms can actually decrease task completion. If you're going to reduce cognitive load by doing this, you need to let them know where they are in the task.
Also, I was a little disappointed at how common-sense a lot of this was, and also thought there'd be some good "easy fix" stuff for people who already had a completed site. This is going around fixing a lot of stuff which should've been done correctly in the first place.