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Sometimes malleability can backfire. By coincidence, just yesterday a friend of mine sent me this Joel on Software classic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000

Sometimes malleability can backfire. By coincidence, just yesterday a friend of mine sent me this Joel on Software classic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ Particularly relevant here is the part about the user who made their taskbar take up half the screen, making their computer unusable.

fjallstrom 7y ago
20 year old article? still fantastic content. wow.
saagarjha 7y ago
I disagree with the point made in that article: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. The best-of-both-worlds is when you give users an option, and then you pick a sensible default for it. Some of the best options are the ones that 90% of people don't even know about, but the 10% that do can find when they need it. I can't tell you how many hidden "defaults" commands I have run that are not even exposed to the UI but make my life much, much nicer.
vsareto 7y ago
Hah, you can still do that on Win10. I wonder why they even bother letting it go to half-screen?
- mellow2020 7y ago
  Why not? Maybe I have a lot of monitors and want to dedicate a small one to a taskbar where I see the full pathname of each editor that has a file open. People who just randomly click things without even realizing they're clicking may just as well delete random files or worse, the taskbar taking up half the screen is about the most harmless consequence I can think of. If it's really such a worry, add a dialog that asks the user "are you sure you want this?" for anything "weird", with a checkbox to "never ask again". If people "accidentally" click that, too, that is really their problem.
cptnapalm 7y ago
Knew a girl who complained that her computer was too slow. As it turns out, she had added every add-on toolbar to Internet Explorer she ever came across. Her usable window was about two inches tall. Yet, it was the speed she complained about, not the utterly unusable web browser window.
marcosdumay 7y ago
You know, there are plenty of drawbacks on the act of offering options to the user, but the article touches on none of them. It has really the wrong focus. It talks about pop-ups and distracting messages; it talks about surprising interfaces; it talks about actions that are hard to undo. But it doesn't talk about any problem that options cause by themselves.
mellow2020 7y ago
> It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren’t the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things. Who is "we"? That didn't describe me in 2000 and describes me even less today. Being able to moving the taskbar is bad because his friend shot herself in the foot this one time, but "we all love Winamp skins" -- because the person whose winamp turned unusable because they double clicked the wrong file just didn't happen to be friends with Joel. Sure, don't make software for me, but don't try to rationalize it with such gymnastics.

fjallstrom 7y ago

20 year old article? still fantastic content. wow.

saagarjha 7y ago

I disagree with the point made in that article: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. The best-of-both-worlds is when you give users an option, and then you pick a sensible default for it. Some of the best options are the ones that 90% of people don't even know about, but the 10% that do can find when they need it. I can't tell you how many hidden "defaults" commands I have run that are not even exposed to the UI but make my life much, much nicer.

vsareto 7y ago

Hah, you can still do that on Win10. I wonder why they even bother letting it go to half-screen?

mellow2020 7y ago
Why not? Maybe I have a lot of monitors and want to dedicate a small one to a taskbar where I see the full pathname of each editor that has a file open. People who just randomly click things without even realizing they're clicking may just as well delete random files or worse, the taskbar taking up half the screen is about the most harmless consequence I can think of. If it's really such a worry, add a dialog that asks the user "are you sure you want this?" for anything "weird", with a checkbox to "never ask again". If people "accidentally" click that, too, that is really their problem.

cptnapalm 7y ago

Knew a girl who complained that her computer was too slow. As it turns out, she had added every add-on toolbar to Internet Explorer she ever came across. Her usable window was about two inches tall. Yet, it was the speed she complained about, not the utterly unusable web browser window.

marcosdumay 7y ago

You know, there are plenty of drawbacks on the act of offering options to the user, but the article touches on none of them. It has really the wrong focus. It talks about pop-ups and distracting messages; it talks about surprising interfaces; it talks about actions that are hard to undo. But it doesn't talk about any problem that options cause by themselves.

mellow2020 7y ago

> It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren’t the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things. Who is "we"? That didn't describe me in 2000 and describes me even less today. Being able to moving the taskbar is bad because his friend shot herself in the foot this one time, but "we all love Winamp skins" -- because the person whose winamp turned unusable because they double clicked the wrong file just didn't happen to be friends with Joel. Sure, don't make software for me, but don't try to rationalize it with such gymnastics.