Ever notice those raised areas for “Diet”, “Decaf”, and other choices on a soft drink or coffee lid, or the places to check off the ingredients on a pizza box or burrito wrapper? Have you ever seen them marked with anything useful? It’s pretty amazing to me that despite seemingly zero value to staff and customers, these little widgets continue to appear on food containers. I guess no one ever complained about them, but you have to wonder if the space might be put to better use.

Websites and web applications can have this problem too. Old features and buttons have a way of sticking around too long. So the next time you’re updating your user interface, take a look at the historical usage logs. Remove the buttons that nobody seems to use, or move them to a less-prominent location. Then, you can allocate this real estate to more productive uses, like making the most important buttons even more obvious to new customers.