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tl;dr: "there is too many setting, most people won't even use them". The solution IMO is not to remove those knobs completely, but to set defaults well and be a

tl;dr: "there is too many setting, most people won't even use them". The solution IMO is not to remove those knobs completely, but to set defaults well and be able to 'pop under the hood' when you need as you probably know what you're doing by then. A good use case is an editor - most recent successful editos such as Sublime, VSCode etc are minimalistic to begin with, but very configurable behind the scenes. For starting user it's nothing but text editor, for an advanced user it can be a full blown, build, testing and deployment enviornment

mathattack 10y ago
Getting the 80/20 rule right on defaults is extremely important. I see this especially in well-written mobile sites, where the GUI complexity cost of configuration is higher.
stephengillie 10y ago
When making Office 2007, the MS Office team had the problem that 99% of their feature requests were for features already existing. Users couldn't find them. Their solution was a UI change, from menus and toolbars, to the oft-maligned Ribbon. Advanced settings were kept almost the same as in previous versions, and the button to access those was an arrow in the section containing common settings.
- ourmandave 10y ago
  Users couldn't find them. That's my problem with the oft-maligned Ribbon. It changes it's appearance based on the window width. So the first time an option might be a large-icon-with-text. The next time you look for it, it may be a small icon, have no text, or be completely hidden. That's 4+ visuals for the same option. </rant>
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Never mind that menus could be navigated by keyboard. You hit alt, then either the highlighted letters or used the arrows to move around. Do it frequently enough and you can pretty much do it blind.