30 ms·

Settings are not a design failure

488 points by tommoor 5y ago

mwcampbell 5y ago
I think the author might be concluding too much from a period of boredom. Shouldn't we design tools primarily for busy, distracted people who have better things to do than mess around with our UI?
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  I don’t think so, at least not universally. If your app is a journal, editor, photo library, or a video player it’s not in your interest to have the user diving into other programs or multitasking. In those cases what they’re comfortable with and what works best for them is more important. Since you’ll come back to the program again and again or for deep work, the long term payoff can be worth messing around with the ui.
rubidium 5y ago
The biggest thing with settings pages is stop redesigning them. If I've figured it out once I don't want to have to again!
- lbebber 5y ago
  Yes but the decision to redesign something might be towards people who haven't figured it out, which if they are a large enough fraction might be worth the tradeoff. (there are other reasons too of course, sometimes not really good ones)
- smegsicle 5y ago
  and then there's the mswindows strategy of never redesigning settings pages, but designing entirely new settings pages that sort-of integrate with the old ones
  - emn13 5y ago
    ...but only expose some of the settings, forcing users to go digging through the archeological pit that are older settings interfaces, because windows somehow things the settings they themselves added previously are pointless. Then, ideally, spend a decade or more to partially and inconsistently replace just a few settings but not all, because somehow that makes sense, and at least that way users are encouraged to each go on their own little archeological dig? Best of all, the new settings look prettier, but aren't always anymore usable, so it's not even really an upgrade.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Also some things are inherently complex. And there might not be good way to make them simple or pretty... I mostly find need to mess with network stuff on Windows and either way isn't exactly great...
      - emn13 5y ago
        But some of it is just poor UX - like one thing I repeatedly come across in both win10 and win11 iterations of settings is the really poor scrolling UX. First of all, the scrollbar is quite thin and easy to miss entirely. That also makes it hard to click on; which may not be the normal way of scrolling, but is sometimes handy - and settings need to be accessible for all kinds of people. Furthermore, the new larger and prettier padding between UI elements inside the scollpane makes is more common for the last on-screen element to have enough lower padding to make the page look visually complete, even though you're missing half (win11 isn't quite as bad as win10 here, but both are clear regressions vs. older versions). But worst of all on the scrolling front is the auto-hiding behavior for the scrollbar. That's is just plain user-hostile. The number of times I've had to help non-techies find settings over the phone, vidchat, or even in person just to discover that the person hadn't noticed the small black scrollbar in the second or so it remains visible on screen, and they just couldn't find the setting they needed even after explanation because it had not occurred to them to even try scrolling. What inane designer thought it was a good idea to needless animate something in the first place, and then additionally to hide critical UX for anyone that merely looks at the screen without interacting with it for just 2 seconds or so? A clear, sad case of form over function. And that's just the scrolling; the incompleteness is a big issue to (though I'm not yet sure how bad win11 is on this front, so let's hope it's at least improved). Also, at least in win10 there's the inconsistency between settings that are immediately applied, and those that require you to apply them. Most apply immediately, which sort of makes sense, but that makes the rare apply button (which also visually is not really an eyecatcher) easy to miss, and there's no warning when you exit without applying. So far I get the feeling this is better in win11, but I haven't tried actively looking for problem cases yet. All in all: very much meh, and I'd rather they made settings obvious, and made it easy to review what you've changed, and which settings differ from the defaults, and in general optimize the UI not for making settings changes quick for those that do this all the time (like, nobody?) and rather focus on making them clear for those people trying to change something they rare change and aren't quite sure what they're doing.
draw_down 5y ago
jacobolus 5y ago
Cramming a big pile of "settings" into your program because you are unwilling to make choices about how things should work is shirking your job as program author/designer, and passing the work along to your hapless users. In many cases something that is a "setting" could be better handled some other way. (For one thing, only a trivial proportion of users are ever going to actually examine your setting page.) You should strive to find another solution first, and only add a new setting as a last resort. This is not to say users shouldn’t be allowed to modify the way things work. Allowing customization of keyboard shortcuts and menu layouts, letting users write or install plugins/extensions, including powerful abstractions that can be combined in unanticipated ways, etc. can all be very helpful.
- mjw1007 5y ago
  What you're saying is the orthodoxy among designers. The author of this article is saying they disagree with that orthodoxy. I don't think it's helpful to just repeat the orthodoxy without saying more. In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.
  - aparks517 5y ago
    > In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification. Reading carefully, I don't think OP made this claim exactly. I suspect all three of us might agree that there are good reasons to add settings and that we should be careful of adding them for bad reasons. I think in many cases a setting gets added not because an individual /refused/ to make a decision but rather because no individual was /empowered/ to make the decision. I find it easy to imagine a meeting (perhaps a meeting with too many participants) that gets deadlocked on some question and the only apparent way to get out before lunch is to compromise on making it a setting. And maybe compromising the design is the best way to go, but then that's how it will be.
  - 5y ago
w0mbat 5y ago
When I was an engineer on Microsoft Office, users would often request features that the product already had. It was great that their problem was quickly fixed (just point them to the right setting), but it shows the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them. If you can do the right thing automatically and avoid having a setting, that is an improvement. My other observation was that everybody said Office had too many features and then asked for two more.
- taeric 5y ago
  This isn't limited to software. Many don't know that cars indicate where this the fuel tank is. Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Really, the list of hidden features on products is such that nobody has solved discovery. Affordances that work are ones that mimic already learned behaviors. But shared learning is not as universal as folks think it is. Interactive systems that let you ask "what will this do?" Or "why did that happen?" Are very good. But even that is hard to work with sometimes. Consider how few folks use the apropos utility.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Haha, I'd think only people who were never in a car as a child wouldn't know that. An adult might not mess with them enough to suss out that behavior, but kids loooove playing with seat belts.
    - bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
      Or people born before seatbelts were invented
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. My brother-in-law is large enough that when he pulls his seatbelt out far enough to actually go around him, it locks, and he absolutely hates it. Is there a reason this "feature" even exists?
saint-loup 5y ago
"First of all, remind yourself that users love settings." [Citation needed] Just like for any UX debate: _it depends_. The level of customization needed depends on the type of app, the type of user, the type of use case.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Users love customization until they hate the result.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ahartmetz 5y ago
    Flashbacks of MySpace...
  - motoxpro 5y ago
    I saved this. This is sooooo insightful
- notatoad 5y ago
  my experience is that users love personalization, but not necessarily "settings". if they have to change a setting to get the functionality they need out of your app, they're going to be frustrated. even if that functionality is one-off weird stuff that makes no sense to be enabled by default. as long as the app does what they want out of the box, they love unnecessary stuff like setting a custom background image or theme color.
- bhauer 5y ago
  How about this rewrite: Some users love settings. Yes, it's an exercise for the developer to know their audience and their affinity for settings. As a user of software, I agree with the author: I am generally happier with software that is highly configurable to my preferences versus software that is rigid and limited to the tastes of the developer. Of course, this is a continuum; I am not so obsessed with configurability that I build my own customized OS from source. But a healthy settings/options/preferences panel is a way to earn my interest as a user.
spicybright 5y ago
Who is saying settings are a design failure? I've never heard of that before.
- intrepidhero 5y ago
  Raskin did (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface). Good book but that was one point I disagreed with.
- thfuran 5y ago
  Modern ui trends seem to suggest that the answer is "pretty much everyone involved in ux/ui design".
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Joel Spolsky, for example: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/
- asoneth 5y ago
  At least when I was studying (and later teaching) human-computer interaction years ago it was a bit more complex than this post makes it out to be. A setting might have been added because the creator legitimately couldn't make up their mind about a feature. Or because end-users have divergent use-cases, preferences, abilities, situations, or hardware. Or because the creator felt that the only way to support two different use-cases was to make two different interfaces with a settings toggle. Each setting has an incremental cost in terms of development, testing, maintenance, documentation, initial onboarding, finding other settings, etc. The best response is to consider whether each setting is sufficiently valuable, and whether there are any settings that can be eliminated with better defaults or more flexible interfaces. Because many people don't have time to do that, products typically end up at one of two extremes. Either they have no settings beyond the ones the creator themselves uses, or they are the union of every setting anyone has ever asked for.
- _2paq 5y ago
indymike 5y ago
We're finding that having settings has helped us siphon customers from our competition. Love sitting in on sales demos and hearing the prospect go, "You let me control that? Thank you!" or "I can chose my colors? I love it!" Delighting customers and users... that's where you want to be.
TrianguloY 5y ago
Search options for settings. When done correctly, it helps a lot. For example, in IntelliJ (and other jetbrains products) you can open settings and search for almost anything. It will search in headers, options, values... And you can quickly find what you need, from the hundreds or more settings available. On the other hand, on Android you can also search, but not only takes very long to actually search, it also duplicates entries and often never finds what you want. But I guess the main issue is that the ability to search settings requires special base structure that you need to develop from the beginning, but when you start programming the number of options is small and you don't think about adding search until it's late.
- giaour 5y ago
  VS Code is another program that I think does search in settings very well. I can't think of a program that isn't an IDE that has taken this approach, though.
  - TrianguloY 5y ago
    KDE settings also has settings search (also windows more or less and other comment mentions mac). An OS is not a program but...close.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    The JAWS screen reader for Windows has had a searchable settings UI for several years. I regret that I and possibly my coworkers, working on a competing product (before I went to Microsoft), used to privately mock that search feature, taking it as evidence that JAWS had gone overboard with settings.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Firefox on desktop?
  - iamcurious 5y ago
    VLC
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
makecheck 5y ago
There is a difference between “the app has a pretty UI to set something” and “this setting is configurable”. One of the great things about the Mac is that there is always the option to defer certain advanced settings to the `defaults` program on the command line (or just things you want to make configurable but do not yet have time to extend the GUI). So if you want a somewhat-streamlined UI with just a few of the most common options, you can do that without completely sacrificing the ability to expose the rest somewhere else.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  One thing the Mac doesn't let me configure, even from the command line, is scroll wheel acceleration. Sure, I can disable pointer acceleration, and I can change the overall scroll wheel speed, but I can't disable acceleration. I feel most comfortable with 1 scroll click being 3 lines of scrolling. It should ALWAYS be that way, no matter how fast I move the wheel. If I quickly flick the wheel and do 5 clicks, that should be 15 lines of scrolling. If I'm very slowly going click....click....click....each click should be 3 lines. Instead, if I scroll quickly, each click might give 5 lines, and if I scroll slowly, each click is a pixel or two, and there's no option to disable this awful scroll acceleration behavior, even on the command line.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    You may want to look into using a third-party tool to remove scrolling acceleration. According to web sleuthing you can change this behavior with SmoothScroll, Mac Mouse Fix, USB Overdrive, SteerMouse, Smooze, or Discrete Scroll. (Disclaimer: I never tried these.)
    - spacexsucks 5y ago
      Goes to prove Mac is not the epitome of design. More like epitome of dumbing down
      - jacobolus 5y ago
milliams 5y ago
One of the first things I do when I install a new app or programme is open the settings and have a look around.
cercatrova 5y ago
I'm gonna stop the author right here: > First of all, remind yourself that users love settings. > Despite initially being born out of the absence of airplane WiFi, I actually enjoy discovering new settings on my iPhone that will make my life easier or improve my productivity. > Just look at your own user behaviour: What do you do when you set up your new computer? > You change your background image. > You adjust your mouse speed. > You set a default browser. > You make all of those rearrangements not because the operating system is badly designed. You make them to create a more comfortable environment. To feel more at home. Because he is a designer, or a somewhat more technical person, he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. They do not change their mouse speed, their background image, their default browser. That's why a meme exists of people thinking the internet is the blue E icon on their desktop. As a corollary, that is why defaults are so powerful, as evidenced in the book Nudge [0]. If you have sensible defaults, you can make users do actions that you want them to do, such as putting out fresh fruit in a cafeteria closer to the reach of the user than junk food which might be farther away, which increased the number of people eating fruit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)
- wruza 5y ago
  Or the number of people eating cheapest junk food. I wish I could align my springboard icons to the bottom. And choose a shiny metal shelf again instead of that acrylic bullshit, but that is just my bad taste.
- avian 5y ago
  > he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. I used to love to fiddle with settings. I gave up because the constant churn of modern software made it too tedious to maintain non-default settings in most applications. What use is spending time to make a more comfortable environment when the software will randomly auto-update in two weeks and might undo all my settings, or worse, change its behavior in such a way that my custom settings just make things worse.
  - mjw1007 5y ago
beardedman 5y ago
> Settings are not a design failure When have settings ever been considered a design failure?
newbie789 5y ago
satyrnein 5y ago
Most people don't love fiddling with settings. People love when software does what they need, and some of them will be willing to fiddle with settings if they have to. Settings are a cost the user pays (just like data entry, loading times, hard drive space, loss of privacy, ads, or the monetary price of the software) in order to get the value. If good defaults mean most users don't have to muck with settings, great, your software is now more valuable. But the only thing worse than having to tweak a setting to get your functionality is not being able to get your functionality at all.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Good default settings are great but please let me tweak. I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. Why not allow me to search for 10-12? Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies “we know better than you what you need”.
  - jagged-chisel 5y ago
    I’m on the fence about intent. It could easily be a team that wishes to limit the inputs to something “manageable.”
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    It's a valley culture. The structure of the team gets reproduced in the product. Read "The soul of a new machine" for a great example. There is an unhealthy elitest hierarchy at many companies which manifests itself as interfaces to users on the assumption they're totally incompetent. It's a reproduction of an insular culture. The worst part is that it's reinforcing. The thing you've probably heard of is the Stanford prison study but there's many similar ones; essentially you set up a context for how you engage with your customer and the customer plays the roles dictated by the context. So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way. Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order. We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us. The core problem of UX is the extreme focus of what kind of user they want as opposed to what kind of context they want to facilitate. The latter is how sustainability, growth, and value happen. It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion". So long as it is within reason, this is possible. People will do difficult things of value (such as a gym) if you're willing to adequately facilitate it. We don't need to limit ourselves to a fast food internet. See the project known as wikipedia for an example.
bhauer 5y ago
I am surprised by the settings skepticism in this thread. By insisting that preferences/settings are indeed a design failure, many here are missing out on relatively easy user delight wins. I think there is an illusory adversarial relationship between good defaults and having user-configurable settings. Having the ability to configure settings does not need to, and indeed should not, supersede having good defaults. Windows Explorer has the ability to hide file extensions, but that should not be the default. Instead of removing settings, some design tactics I've found useful in building software: 1. Provide multiple default settings profiles. E.g., beginner, advanced, and expert. The problem with a single, rigid configuration is that you can't satisfy all user types. On the other hand, acknowledging that not every user wants to fiddle with settings, providing a quick way to more closely match their needs via multiple default profiles is a win. 2. Always provide settings import and export, or some form of settings synchronization between instances. One of the main reasons users don't use settings is that they are exhausted by having to re-apply all of their preferences every time they install your app. I've installed Firefox about a hundred times across many computers. If I had to manually adjust it to my preferences, re-install and configure add-ons, and so on, I'd just give up and use more of the defaults. The idea of having to re-train NoScript alone is unbearable. 3. Provide better descriptions of what settings do and why they are offered. This can be inline help within the settings dialog or "show me" buttons, or whatever. A good example you're probably familiar with are video game options panels that say things like, "Enabling this may help increase framerate in the following circumstances: ..." Firefox is similarly pretty good about this. But many apps don't give the user much explanation for settings, adopting a more "if you know, you know" attitude. Don't assume that because your user is a "layperson" that they can't understand what your app's settings do if you take the time to explain them.
- max49 5y ago
  >The problem with a single, rigid configuration is that you can't satisfy all user types. From a user point of view, the problem is that satisfying beginners will get more click/impression/downloads/etc.. If the company is managed by accountants, you end up with products that get shittier every version.
adamleithp 5y ago
Side note: linear’s website especially the home page, makes my iPhone 11 crash when zooming in and out. Firefox Daylight 39.0 (6519) Crazy.
xg15 5y ago
I love settings. I hate losing settings and having to fiddle with everything all over again. I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend ages going through the appearance options and customisimg pretty much everything. Even later, I knew of people who had a meticulous desktop ordering or spent substantial amount of time ordering favourite icons in the browser. All that was great fun until the first time, the settings were lost. Maybe you had to reinstall the OS (or got a new PC) or maybe the program updated and simply erased the settings. In any case, trying to redo everything you had arranged before looked to be an enormous amount of work and not fun at all. So after the second time, this happened, we gave up and accepted the standard. But this eas not because we didn't want customisation, it was because the experience was too frustrating. My impression is that in modern UX, not only do opportunities for customisation become less and less, the results are also increasingly ephemeral. E.g., there is still no option under Windows to save the arrangement of desktop icons - but there is a menu shortcut which will instantly rearrange everything and render your own arrangement moot. I think this shows a pretty clear priority of the designers. My impression is that customisation opportunities are simply conflicting with a lot of priorites of moders software developers, much more so than their users: Companies want the freedom to frequently change the UI and control overy tiny detail about the "experience" - customisation runs directly counter to that. In some extreme cases, companies even want the freedom to build deliberately unpleasant designs (dark patterns). Additionally, an inflexible UI also provides more opportunity to present some minor improvements as significant new features ("twitter now has three different colour schemes!", "iOS now can show two apps at the same time!"). Last but not least, an inflexible UI lets you actually sell certain adjustments as a premium feature - e.g. YouTube letting you listen to a video in the background. All of this are strong incentives for software companies to get rid of settings, but none of it has to do with users not liking settings.
- gknoy 5y ago
  It seems like a good reason to have settings be something that are _automatically exported / stored_, so that you can put them in version control and re-fetch them later, or at least export/import.
  - 5y ago
flenserboy 5y ago
Being able to change settings is fantastic. ResEdit taught me that being able to do more than that is even better.
ptx 5y ago
> One of the small preferences we introduced in the Linear app is not displaying the mouse cursor pointer over links. We want to mimic the feeling you natively have on the desktop with our Mac app. Hmm. This might actually be an example of settings as a result of design failure. The text in the screenshot describes the setting as applying not just to links but to "any interactive element". But most native desktop apps (which they're trying to mimic) would use a special cursor for links and a regular mouse cursor for other interactive elements, so it seems that (by entangling links and other interactive elements) the setting allows a choice of two incorrect behaviours instead of just behaving correctly by default.
- enra 5y ago
  The text is maybe confusing but how it works is that the setting is either "Native" or "Web" style. Native means that interactive elements like toolbar items, nav or icons are just show the regular cursor and links in text use the pointer (Mail app) Web style is what is common with many web apps and sites where every interactive element uses the pointer (Slack). The reason for the setting that people seem to be one way or the other on which they are used to.
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    Are you using one of "pointer" or "cursor" (which are synonyms, to me[1]) to refer to either an I-beam cursor, or the hand cursor, commonly used to indicate a clickable hyperlink? (I actually dislike how text in native apps doesn't often permit the use of I-beam; it'd be a lot easier to copy/paste errors if one could highlight them.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointe...
    - paulirish 5y ago
      In CSS, the hand cursor is called a 'pointer' cursor, so I think that's what was intended. For anyone who hasn't internalized this, including the app's users, I imagine this is quite confusing. :) IIUC 'regular cursor' is just the default mouse cursor. I don't think anyone meant the I-beam/text cursor, but I agree with your selection comment entirely.
jdub 5y ago
Don't make me tap the sign. https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html
- frickinLasers 5y ago
  Ugh. As a not-really-power user I can't stand Gnome 3, not least because I have to Google how to and then install a tool just to make useful settings accessible. Everything in Tweaks should be in the default settings panel.
  - p_l 5y ago
    I remember I dumped GNOME around 2.4, due to discussions about print UI and how close to every setting should be removed from it, possibly retained in Gconf. At the time there was still the idea that "sure, we lost a lot of settings and features in rewrite between 1.4 and 2.0, but we're going to add them back"... and the printing discussion gave me red alert of moving to "developers know best". The further evolution of GNOME only reinforced that feeling.
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    That is exactly Mac for me.
- _2paq 5y ago
  Ah yes, the "every preference has a cost" philosophy which leads people into deciding things like that everyone on Earth is ok with a One True Colorscheme (Adwaita) and a One True Font (Cantarell). People who suffer from halation due to the contrast of the dark version of Adwaita and people who like fonts besides Cantarell don't exist.
nitwit005 5y ago
The other reason for settings seems to be turning off things that the UI designers insisted on, but which all actual customers hate. See the display density (amount of whitespace) option in Salesforce for an example of this.
paxys 5y ago
It's nice to have settings, but you also absolutely need to have defaults which work for the vast majority of the user base who will never open the settings menu.
jrm4 5y ago
That is is even a question shows how broken this entire field is, and is everything I hate about modern software development. It really should not be the goal of "design" to try to create "one experience fits all," because when you do that you create the lowest common denominator, the dumbest experience possible. If you care at all about allowing grownups to do grownup things with their software; if you care that people should be allowed to push themselves to their own technical and mental limits in order to get things done in a good way for them at all, then yes, you need to allow for things like "settings."
- overgard 5y ago
  One thing that always frustrates me is that most "redesigns" end up removing useful settings, or hiding them. Hiding complexity doesn't make software less complex to use, it just makes it harder to find what you're looking for.
  - zepolen 5y ago
    Sure but think about if a particular setting is used by 0.1% of the user base but takes up 5% of the real estate and confuses the 99.9% of users that have no idea what it is and no intention of ever using it.
    - Underphil 5y ago
      But that 0.1% may actually need that setting for the product to work for them. By all means hide the settings, but don't remove them entirely. A lot of evidence seems to support advanced users having a proclivity toward tweaking, so something like about:config in the browser seems to work fine (as an example).
    - SrslyJosh 5y ago
      Here's what you said, minus the arbitrary numbers: > Sure but think about if a particular setting is used by a minority of the user base but takes up some of the real estate and confuses the majority of users that have no idea what it is and no intention of ever using it. Now that we've removed the arbitrary numbers... ;-) If the way setting is presented is confusing, then that is the problem that needs to be fixed. Remove the confusion, maybe make it less prominent in the UI, but taking away the setting doesn't actually solve the problem, it just breaks the product for the users who need it.
stormking 5y ago
I love settings, browsing the settings screen gives me a feeling about how mighty a software is. Software without settings is usually very shallow, only supporting a handful of usecases. But in the modern SaaS world, they still want to charge 5 bucks per month. No thanks.
awinter-py 5y ago
settings are also a great resolution to behind-the-scenes design conversations in particular the classic 'PM wants to incentivize a flow, developer thinks it will be annoying as shit and threatens to throw phone out the window' 'let's make this a setting to see if people turn it off' is my favorite compromise for these. (Also simplifies phase two of a gradual rollout, because jealous early adopters can turn the beta setting on manually)
scrozier 5y ago
This article, and many of the comments here, commits a central mistake: declaring things to be true with no evidence. "Users love settings." Umm, prove it. Even more glaring, the author goes on to use his own anecdotal story to make his point. If there's one thing I've learned in decades in software development (and there's not), it's that my opinion is not a satisfactory proxy for "what everyone thinks/does."
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
The author is correct, but it's sad that he had to say that. I am not thrilled with "inviolate rules of thumb," as a general principle. Don't get me wrong. I have been doing what I do for a very long time, and have developed a huge library of habits, practices, and heuristics, in my work. It's just that I treat them as guidelines, as opposed to "Thou Shalt Not" commandments. If an old or obscure pattern fits the bill for what I am doing now, I use it. If the problem looks, but is not exactly, like an issue that I have solved in the past, I will see if I can adjust the old solution to fit today's conundrum; even if the old solution is in a "Thou Shalt Not" area. If a current buzzword du jour is nonsensical in my work, I don't use it; no matter how good it looks on my CV. Basically, because of my experience, I am allowed to color outside the lines. A lot of times, I need to look at what others have done, and, if I am not an expert in their field, I have a lot less flexibility in what I can do. For example, in the app I'm developing, the core functionality is pretty much done, and it's time to start gussying it up, putting some lipstick on the porker, theming it, what-have-you. I was originally trained as an artist, but that was a long time ago, and my stuff tended to have a rather "prime color" palette. Think "Magpie on LSD." I don't trust my own design sense, when it comes to a palette. I need to look at what others have done. I won't be able to deviate much, as I don't have their design sense. I don't do "subtle," too well...
deleted 5y ago
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bigcat123 5y ago
jesprenj 5y ago
Is it just me or does the website flash with content for a second which is then replaced with a fake "Not found" display? I'm on my phone so I'll not debug anything right now.
atoav 5y ago
I love settings. It is the first thing I open if I start a new program. It tells me about the maturity of the program. Whether it is a toy or something really well thought out.
- Graffur 5y ago
  I would imagine the overlap between people who love settings and people on HN is quite large :) I also love settings with the exception of web browsers for some reason.
mmphosis 5y ago
Using the word "Settings" is a design failure. For example, when I right click on my so-called modern desktop, there is a longish drop down menu with a "Desktop Settings..." menu item in it which goes to a window named "Desktop" and defaults to the Background tab. On my more antiquated OS, the menu item is named "Change Desktop Background..." which seems more obvious / discoverable.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > a "Desktop Settings..." menu item in it which goes to a window named "Desktop" and defaults to the Background tab. On my more antiquated OS, the menu item is named "Change Desktop Background..." which seems more obvious / discoverable. So the newer settings dialogue changes more stuff about the desktop than just the background? How would the menu label "Change Desktop Background..." make all that other stuff more obvious or discoverable than "Desktop Settings"?
pimlottc 5y ago
“Users love settings” Author then goes on to talk about their own personal love of settings and does not offer any evidence that their actual users want settings. Whether settings are good or bad depends ENTIRELY on your specific users and their specific needs. Blanket statements like this based entirely on one particular designer’s feelings are not particularly convincing.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
It's a common antipattern to design away settings, and practical usability, with artistic purity. OTOH, providing an endless jumble of uncommon settings is overwhelming to almost everyone. 1. Make things work in the common-most use-cases, for power users and novices. I think there's a lack of respect shown to people who have difficult, edge-case, real problems to solve, like batch receiving orders while being forced into narrow pagination and sparse layouts suitable only for casual customers. Usable search and bulk actions are needed in more contexts than originally assumed. 2. If someone asks for it, there could be 100 who didn't speak-up but also want it. 3. Organize and explain settings succinctly. 4. Have a reset to defaults option.
strictfp 5y ago
A good "setting" is something that's part of the normal UI. Take brush size in Photoshop as a simple example. You obviously don't want to set that in some control panel. So you just integrate it into the main UI. I think one should strive to do the same with most settings.
davikrr 5y ago
Every time an application (i.e Firefox) removes a feature due to "low user adoption" I feel the extents of this kind of UX misunderstanding.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
> While I was reorganizing my phone, I had a sudden realization: Settings are typically seen as the result of design failure. The thinking goes that as designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustments by the user. Consequently, offering customization options is interpreted as a failure to make firm product decisions. I wonder if the author has ever considered how much users hate when things arbitrarily change as designers try to figure out what the One True Product Experience should be. (Or, more likely, try to optimize some metric management is unhappy about.)
karmakaze 5y ago
The thing I most dislike about settings is that many products once they create settings for a thing then don't put thought into sensible defaults with the logic, "oh they can just change that". So in a way settings can be a crutch.
franciscop 5y ago
Design tip: don't load a 4000px image into a 800px container, it's very wasteful for everyone involved. Or maybe provide some settings so I can adjust it? :)
jmull 5y ago
Users love settings for things they care about… and abhor and ignore settings on things they don’t care about. Better get your defaults right. That is: don’t force your users to answer questions they don’t know the answer to. Also, partition your settings by user concern… that is, don’t confront your users with a bunch of questions they don’t understand or care about (even if the defaults are right).
fito 5y ago
Just a little bit dumbed down, but this is the absolute correct take. Settings are design features, not bugs. Settings are beneficial to diverse kinds of humans.
cletus 5y ago
I mostly disagree with this. To quote Joel Spolsky [1]: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. At least the author differentiates on types of settings: > There’s a difference between product settings that a product needs to get right by default and preferences that designers deliberately shouldn’t have a strong opinion on. I can get on board with separating cosmetic choices and non-cosmetic settings. If you're shipping a product, every setting is a potential bug because you don't test that particular setting necessarily. Worse, every combination of settings is a potential bug. Ideally, settings shouldn't allow you to put your product in an invalid state. That almost always happens with any nontrivial set of non-cosmetic settings however. I've brought up this example many times but many here won't remember the early days of connecting to Wifi. On Windows this meant answering questions like: - Encryption type (eg None, WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2, WPA2-PSK) - Passphrase (is this a password? Is it something else? Well, that depends on the encryption type) - SSID Apple came along and reduced this to SSID and password. The principle I take from this is never, ever ask users to enter something that you can figure out on your own. Like you can figure out the Wifi encryption type so why ask? Another example: why ask me for a state and a ZIP code? The ZIP code tells you the state. Settings so often fall into this bucket. You have settings for things that don't make sense, that you can figure out the answer to and are dependent on other settings. Practically speaking, settings become a cultural disease because product and UI/UX people can't agree and someone "compromises" by saying "let's make it a setting" rather than figuring out the right answer. Design is the art of compromise. Settings are the art of not making a decision. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  All of those features that he poo poohs in there are useful and I used them as a newb on Windows. This is Bs gospel. Sure I have had people ask me "dumb" questions but removing the customizavility is not the answer. Your examples are valid except when zip code lookup fails or wifi lookup is not correct and the systems tries to think for me. It takes away that option. This thinking is a disease and the reason I am left with half assed systems that i ahve to work around for my friends and family everyday. A friend felt dumb for not knowing how to plugin a line out cable on her iphone because apple decided 3.5 mm is outdated. I told her she isnt dumb and it is not her job to know that. This is thinking is causing more dumbing down of people than anything else. My parents feel dumb for not knowing how to use a smartphone. The dumb android dialer calls randomly and goes to background with no way to hangup. My dad cant figure out what to touch to close it. With a physical button he can close it easy. Windows phone was miles ahead than latest ios and android in call screen which is what a phone should be for. So are "feature" phones. As a cutting tech engineer, I prefer those over the ad mining machines that are iOS and android My mom feels dumb for not knowing how to order on a website because everything now requires a login which requires a unique password and 2fa and a unique workflow with godawful hidden icons that every UX team wants to lay their marks on and eveything useful gets moved to the overflow menu, the gear or hamburger on some random side of the page. Just have clear wordings with accelerator keys and tab bindings Also because Joel spolsky is right on some things, doesnt mean we should listen to Everything he says. That leads to a monoculture and people are different and diverse. So should be designs. They should be more accomodating of differences, isntead of the current my way or the highway of restricted UXs and walled gardens
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Does he understand the idea right? The program shouldn't require a change in settings in order to work: it should have reasonably workable default settings. This doesn't preclude customization at all.
yread 5y ago
settings are also a liability, a form of technical debt. When you add new settings you have to make sure it works with every (logical) combination of other settings. And you need to keep doing it in the future possibly forever because users hate settings being removed. So, your tests get bigger, adding new features and especially settings becomes costlier.I try to avoid it as much as I can
asddubs 5y ago
My take: Settings are a last resort. The more settings you have, the less likely a user is to actually find the one they need. So some settings are good, but too many are bad. E.g. dark mode is a setting that just makes sense because different users have different preferences. But it's quite easy to measure what settings almost no one is using, and to axe those. In other cases you may be able to figure out a smarter way to offer the functionality without a checkbox hidden away in a settings page
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > But it's quite easy to measure what settings almost no one is using, and to axe those. The chance is high that the "almost no one" group is actually the ones that use your app the most. Casual users won't care much about some setting five layers deep in the menu, but the ones who are dedicated enough to actually find it will care. The constant "optimization" by taking features away that "no one" uses is what drives so many users away from installing updates. Please stop that bullshit. I'd like to not fear updates again.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    Ha, I knew I would get called out on that. To be honest, in my specific case, I doubt it, I've removed some pretty pointless legacy settings which only had minor cosmetic effects. I know this stuff is in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes there genuinely are settings that someone asked for a decade ago that no one else really wanted, or possibly wasn't even what the person asking meant. But the way this usually works on our app is that the setting is just removed for anyone who has it set to the default value at that moment, so people who previously changed it won't have their stuff messed with.
- mmis1000 5y ago
  Firefox forcely remove the separator between tabs in new design because users won't open too many tab in general, and they won't make the tab too small to differ. And I fxxking hate it. Because I am the user that will open many tab and make the tab small. So does this mean I should not use firefox because I use it wrong? It's really a shitty attitude if you are exactly the one that they claims 'not-important'. Pray for you not being lucky enough to be the one 'not-important' if you don't know the pain yet.
andyjohnson0 5y ago
I had a realisation a while ago that one of the first things I do when I start using a new app, or after a significant update, is to look at the settings. It gives me a feel for the "functionality space" of the application and helps me visualise its "boundaries" somehow. Different ways of presenting properties seem to make this harder or easier: I find Android to be less good and (for example) Visual Studio and Lightroom to be better. I'm not sure why. Does anyone else do this?
- kubami 5y ago
  I came to say the same thing. Although I would never be able to put is so eloquently into words. For me this goes further. Anytime I rent a car I browse settings. "Oh cool, this car has lane-assist, and radar-powered cruise control". People look at me weird. I think this is the same mindset that drew me to linux 20 years ago, when compiling and tweaking your own gentoo was not-crazy. "Let's just say, if your VCR is blinking 12:00 linux is not for you"
dusted 5y ago
Spend time to design the defaults. Make sure that most users won't ever have to change a thing, but always, always have the settings, and always mark what the default value is, so if someone messes it up, they can find their way back. Forcing the user to make decisions because it was hard or annoying to find a good default decision is why some people have come to hate settings. I hate being forced to create a configuration. I love being allowed to change one.
eternityforest 5y ago
In some cases they are. Global config needed to support a local module(As in a PHP app depending on proper Apache conf) kinda sucks because it can create conflicts that can only be solved manually or with a container. Settings that can't be done via GUI suck. I shouldn't have to dig through some other app and copy and paste an IP address to use your thing. Settings should not have to change for common activities. US vs Metric should be a document property. I should not have to change settings to properly view a certain document. Settings without sane defaults suck too. A good setting is "Here's a discovery server, but you can change it". A crappy setting is "Select an API version for this global daemon that 5 other things use, and only 3 can work at the same time". Anything that can by dynamic and autodetected... probably should be unless there's a really good reason.
cestith 5y ago
It is both possible and desirable to build into a product a strong set of assumptions and useful defaults which can be easily overridden when your assumptions do not hold for every case. The problem with settings and option flags is when a user needs to set a great deal of them to get anything done. Smart defaults for the common case are useful. Overrides for the uncommon case expand that utility to more cases. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, a pragmatic and helpful combination. Have defaults. Allow overrides of them.
winrid 5y ago
Oh, well that's good. We have one or two or hundred settings... https://docs.fastcomments.com/guide-customizations-and-configuration.html https://docs.fastcomments.com/guide-customizations-and-confi...
blooalien 5y ago
One of the reasons I love the KDE desktop environment on Linux is because it has settings available to customize nearly everything about it, but it has good default settings out of the box, so you don't have to customize much, but any time you want to customize something, you can go dig around in the settings and find it and change it easily to fit your needs. That's honestly the way it should be. Good settings by default for users who like to just use things as they are, but options readily available to easily change things if you want to.
antpls 5y ago
No one mentioned video games settings? It's a solved problem there, have profiles : "Low", "Medium", "High", "Ultra High". They allow for a quick start, then as the user is more aware of the feature, the user can tune the predefined profiles themselves. You can have independent profiles for each independent feature : input profiles (keyboard/gamepads), graphics profiles, audio profiles, etc For example, on a Google account, that would be a single drop down list with those options: "Private and no personalized experience" (everything turned off), "Private with personalized experience", "Public"

488 points by tommoor 5y ago

I think the author might be concluding too much from a period of boredom. Shouldn't we design tools primarily for busy, distracted people who have better things to do than mess around with our UI?

twobitshifter 5y ago
I don’t think so, at least not universally. If your app is a journal, editor, photo library, or a video player it’s not in your interest to have the user diving into other programs or multitasking. In those cases what they’re comfortable with and what works best for them is more important. Since you’ll come back to the program again and again or for deep work, the long term payoff can be worth messing around with the ui.

rubidium 5y ago

The biggest thing with settings pages is stop redesigning them. If I've figured it out once I don't want to have to again!

lbebber 5y ago
Yes but the decision to redesign something might be towards people who haven't figured it out, which if they are a large enough fraction might be worth the tradeoff. (there are other reasons too of course, sometimes not really good ones)
smegsicle 5y ago
and then there's the mswindows strategy of never redesigning settings pages, but designing entirely new settings pages that sort-of integrate with the old ones
- emn13 5y ago
  ...but only expose some of the settings, forcing users to go digging through the archeological pit that are older settings interfaces, because windows somehow things the settings they themselves added previously are pointless. Then, ideally, spend a decade or more to partially and inconsistently replace just a few settings but not all, because somehow that makes sense, and at least that way users are encouraged to each go on their own little archeological dig? Best of all, the new settings look prettier, but aren't always anymore usable, so it's not even really an upgrade.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Also some things are inherently complex. And there might not be good way to make them simple or pretty... I mostly find need to mess with network stuff on Windows and either way isn't exactly great...
    - emn13 5y ago
      But some of it is just poor UX - like one thing I repeatedly come across in both win10 and win11 iterations of settings is the really poor scrolling UX. First of all, the scrollbar is quite thin and easy to miss entirely. That also makes it hard to click on; which may not be the normal way of scrolling, but is sometimes handy - and settings need to be accessible for all kinds of people. Furthermore, the new larger and prettier padding between UI elements inside the scollpane makes is more common for the last on-screen element to have enough lower padding to make the page look visually complete, even though you're missing half (win11 isn't quite as bad as win10 here, but both are clear regressions vs. older versions). But worst of all on the scrolling front is the auto-hiding behavior for the scrollbar. That's is just plain user-hostile. The number of times I've had to help non-techies find settings over the phone, vidchat, or even in person just to discover that the person hadn't noticed the small black scrollbar in the second or so it remains visible on screen, and they just couldn't find the setting they needed even after explanation because it had not occurred to them to even try scrolling. What inane designer thought it was a good idea to needless animate something in the first place, and then additionally to hide critical UX for anyone that merely looks at the screen without interacting with it for just 2 seconds or so? A clear, sad case of form over function. And that's just the scrolling; the incompleteness is a big issue to (though I'm not yet sure how bad win11 is on this front, so let's hope it's at least improved). Also, at least in win10 there's the inconsistency between settings that are immediately applied, and those that require you to apply them. Most apply immediately, which sort of makes sense, but that makes the rare apply button (which also visually is not really an eyecatcher) easy to miss, and there's no warning when you exit without applying. So far I get the feeling this is better in win11, but I haven't tried actively looking for problem cases yet. All in all: very much meh, and I'd rather they made settings obvious, and made it easy to review what you've changed, and which settings differ from the defaults, and in general optimize the UI not for making settings changes quick for those that do this all the time (like, nobody?) and rather focus on making them clear for those people trying to change something they rare change and aren't quite sure what they're doing.

draw_down 5y ago

jacobolus 5y ago

Cramming a big pile of "settings" into your program because you are unwilling to make choices about how things should work is shirking your job as program author/designer, and passing the work along to your hapless users. In many cases something that is a "setting" could be better handled some other way. (For one thing, only a trivial proportion of users are ever going to actually examine your setting page.) You should strive to find another solution first, and only add a new setting as a last resort. This is not to say users shouldn’t be allowed to modify the way things work. Allowing customization of keyboard shortcuts and menu layouts, letting users write or install plugins/extensions, including powerful abstractions that can be combined in unanticipated ways, etc. can all be very helpful.

mjw1007 5y ago
What you're saying is the orthodoxy among designers. The author of this article is saying they disagree with that orthodoxy. I don't think it's helpful to just repeat the orthodoxy without saying more. In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.
- aparks517 5y ago
  > In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification. Reading carefully, I don't think OP made this claim exactly. I suspect all three of us might agree that there are good reasons to add settings and that we should be careful of adding them for bad reasons. I think in many cases a setting gets added not because an individual /refused/ to make a decision but rather because no individual was /empowered/ to make the decision. I find it easy to imagine a meeting (perhaps a meeting with too many participants) that gets deadlocked on some question and the only apparent way to get out before lunch is to compromise on making it a setting. And maybe compromising the design is the best way to go, but then that's how it will be.
- 5y ago

w0mbat 5y ago

When I was an engineer on Microsoft Office, users would often request features that the product already had. It was great that their problem was quickly fixed (just point them to the right setting), but it shows the lack of discoverability that happens when the list of settings gets long and you have to dig for them. If you can do the right thing automatically and avoid having a setting, that is an improvement. My other observation was that everybody said Office had too many features and then asked for two more.

taeric 5y ago
This isn't limited to software. Many don't know that cars indicate where this the fuel tank is. Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Really, the list of hidden features on products is such that nobody has solved discovery. Affordances that work are ones that mimic already learned behaviors. But shared learning is not as universal as folks think it is. Interactive systems that let you ask "what will this do?" Or "why did that happen?" Are very good. But even that is hard to work with sometimes. Consider how few folks use the apropos utility.
- brimble 5y ago
  > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. Haha, I'd think only people who were never in a car as a child wouldn't know that. An adult might not mess with them enough to suss out that behavior, but kids loooove playing with seat belts.
  - bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    Or people born before seatbelts were invented
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > Or that seatbelts lock if you pull them all the way out. My brother-in-law is large enough that when he pulls his seatbelt out far enough to actually go around him, it locks, and he absolutely hates it. Is there a reason this "feature" even exists?

saint-loup 5y ago

"First of all, remind yourself that users love settings." [Citation needed] Just like for any UX debate: _it depends_. The level of customization needed depends on the type of app, the type of user, the type of use case.

deanCommie 5y ago
Users love customization until they hate the result.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  Flashbacks of MySpace...
- motoxpro 5y ago
  I saved this. This is sooooo insightful
notatoad 5y ago
my experience is that users love personalization, but not necessarily "settings". if they have to change a setting to get the functionality they need out of your app, they're going to be frustrated. even if that functionality is one-off weird stuff that makes no sense to be enabled by default. as long as the app does what they want out of the box, they love unnecessary stuff like setting a custom background image or theme color.
bhauer 5y ago
How about this rewrite: Some users love settings. Yes, it's an exercise for the developer to know their audience and their affinity for settings. As a user of software, I agree with the author: I am generally happier with software that is highly configurable to my preferences versus software that is rigid and limited to the tastes of the developer. Of course, this is a continuum; I am not so obsessed with configurability that I build my own customized OS from source. But a healthy settings/options/preferences panel is a way to earn my interest as a user.

spicybright 5y ago

Who is saying settings are a design failure? I've never heard of that before.

intrepidhero 5y ago
Raskin did (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface). Good book but that was one point I disagreed with.
thfuran 5y ago
Modern ui trends seem to suggest that the answer is "pretty much everyone involved in ux/ui design".
mwcampbell 5y ago
Joel Spolsky, for example: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/
asoneth 5y ago
At least when I was studying (and later teaching) human-computer interaction years ago it was a bit more complex than this post makes it out to be. A setting might have been added because the creator legitimately couldn't make up their mind about a feature. Or because end-users have divergent use-cases, preferences, abilities, situations, or hardware. Or because the creator felt that the only way to support two different use-cases was to make two different interfaces with a settings toggle. Each setting has an incremental cost in terms of development, testing, maintenance, documentation, initial onboarding, finding other settings, etc. The best response is to consider whether each setting is sufficiently valuable, and whether there are any settings that can be eliminated with better defaults or more flexible interfaces. Because many people don't have time to do that, products typically end up at one of two extremes. Either they have no settings beyond the ones the creator themselves uses, or they are the union of every setting anyone has ever asked for.
_2paq 5y ago

indymike 5y ago

We're finding that having settings has helped us siphon customers from our competition. Love sitting in on sales demos and hearing the prospect go, "You let me control that? Thank you!" or "I can chose my colors? I love it!" Delighting customers and users... that's where you want to be.

TrianguloY 5y ago

Search options for settings. When done correctly, it helps a lot. For example, in IntelliJ (and other jetbrains products) you can open settings and search for almost anything. It will search in headers, options, values... And you can quickly find what you need, from the hundreds or more settings available. On the other hand, on Android you can also search, but not only takes very long to actually search, it also duplicates entries and often never finds what you want. But I guess the main issue is that the ability to search settings requires special base structure that you need to develop from the beginning, but when you start programming the number of options is small and you don't think about adding search until it's late.

giaour 5y ago
VS Code is another program that I think does search in settings very well. I can't think of a program that isn't an IDE that has taken this approach, though.
- TrianguloY 5y ago
  KDE settings also has settings search (also windows more or less and other comment mentions mac). An OS is not a program but...close.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  The JAWS screen reader for Windows has had a searchable settings UI for several years. I regret that I and possibly my coworkers, working on a competing product (before I went to Microsoft), used to privately mock that search feature, taking it as evidence that JAWS had gone overboard with settings.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Firefox on desktop?
- iamcurious 5y ago
  VLC
- spacexsucks 5y ago

makecheck 5y ago

There is a difference between “the app has a pretty UI to set something” and “this setting is configurable”. One of the great things about the Mac is that there is always the option to defer certain advanced settings to the `defaults` program on the command line (or just things you want to make configurable but do not yet have time to extend the GUI). So if you want a somewhat-streamlined UI with just a few of the most common options, you can do that without completely sacrificing the ability to expose the rest somewhere else.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
One thing the Mac doesn't let me configure, even from the command line, is scroll wheel acceleration. Sure, I can disable pointer acceleration, and I can change the overall scroll wheel speed, but I can't disable acceleration. I feel most comfortable with 1 scroll click being 3 lines of scrolling. It should ALWAYS be that way, no matter how fast I move the wheel. If I quickly flick the wheel and do 5 clicks, that should be 15 lines of scrolling. If I'm very slowly going click....click....click....each click should be 3 lines. Instead, if I scroll quickly, each click might give 5 lines, and if I scroll slowly, each click is a pixel or two, and there's no option to disable this awful scroll acceleration behavior, even on the command line.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  You may want to look into using a third-party tool to remove scrolling acceleration. According to web sleuthing you can change this behavior with SmoothScroll, Mac Mouse Fix, USB Overdrive, SteerMouse, Smooze, or Discrete Scroll. (Disclaimer: I never tried these.)
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Goes to prove Mac is not the epitome of design. More like epitome of dumbing down
    - jacobolus 5y ago

milliams 5y ago

One of the first things I do when I install a new app or programme is open the settings and have a look around.

cercatrova 5y ago

I'm gonna stop the author right here: > First of all, remind yourself that users love settings. > Despite initially being born out of the absence of airplane WiFi, I actually enjoy discovering new settings on my iPhone that will make my life easier or improve my productivity. > Just look at your own user behaviour: What do you do when you set up your new computer? > You change your background image. > You adjust your mouse speed. > You set a default browser. > You make all of those rearrangements not because the operating system is badly designed. You make them to create a more comfortable environment. To feel more at home. Because he is a designer, or a somewhat more technical person, he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. They do not change their mouse speed, their background image, their default browser. That's why a meme exists of people thinking the internet is the blue E icon on their desktop. As a corollary, that is why defaults are so powerful, as evidenced in the book Nudge [0]. If you have sensible defaults, you can make users do actions that you want them to do, such as putting out fresh fruit in a cafeteria closer to the reach of the user than junk food which might be farther away, which increased the number of people eating fruit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)

wruza 5y ago
Or the number of people eating cheapest junk food. I wish I could align my springboard icons to the bottom. And choose a shiny metal shelf again instead of that acrylic bullshit, but that is just my bad taste.
avian 5y ago
> he may love fiddling with settings, but the vast majority of people do not. I used to love to fiddle with settings. I gave up because the constant churn of modern software made it too tedious to maintain non-default settings in most applications. What use is spending time to make a more comfortable environment when the software will randomly auto-update in two weeks and might undo all my settings, or worse, change its behavior in such a way that my custom settings just make things worse.
- mjw1007 5y ago

beardedman 5y ago

> Settings are not a design failure When have settings ever been considered a design failure?

newbie789 5y ago

satyrnein 5y ago

Most people don't love fiddling with settings. People love when software does what they need, and some of them will be willing to fiddle with settings if they have to. Settings are a cost the user pays (just like data entry, loading times, hard drive space, loss of privacy, ads, or the monetary price of the software) in order to get the value. If good defaults mean most users don't have to muck with settings, great, your software is now more valuable. But the only thing worse than having to tweak a setting to get your functionality is not being able to get your functionality at all.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
Good default settings are great but please let me tweak. I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. Why not allow me to search for 10-12? Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies “we know better than you what you need”.
- jagged-chisel 5y ago
  I’m on the fence about intent. It could easily be a team that wishes to limit the inputs to something “manageable.”
- kristopolous 5y ago
  It's a valley culture. The structure of the team gets reproduced in the product. Read "The soul of a new machine" for a great example. There is an unhealthy elitest hierarchy at many companies which manifests itself as interfaces to users on the assumption they're totally incompetent. It's a reproduction of an insular culture. The worst part is that it's reinforcing. The thing you've probably heard of is the Stanford prison study but there's many similar ones; essentially you set up a context for how you engage with your customer and the customer plays the roles dictated by the context. So you treat users like idiots and then they start acting like idiots. It really does work that way. Let me give an intuitive analogy for those unconvinced. We're going to use a gym, library, and bar. The same person would be exercising, studying, and drinking at those institutions, in specifically that order. We shape the buildings (create the context); thereafter they shape us. The core problem of UX is the extreme focus of what kind of user they want as opposed to what kind of context they want to facilitate. The latter is how sustainability, growth, and value happen. It's the difference between say assuming your customers are alcoholics and then building a bar and saying "it is of public benefit, profitable to our company, whatever, if our users studied so let us make a library and they will rise to the occasion". So long as it is within reason, this is possible. People will do difficult things of value (such as a gym) if you're willing to adequately facilitate it. We don't need to limit ourselves to a fast food internet. See the project known as wikipedia for an example.

bhauer 5y ago

I am surprised by the settings skepticism in this thread. By insisting that preferences/settings are indeed a design failure, many here are missing out on relatively easy user delight wins. I think there is an illusory adversarial relationship between good defaults and having user-configurable settings. Having the ability to configure settings does not need to, and indeed should not, supersede having good defaults. Windows Explorer has the ability to hide file extensions, but that should not be the default. Instead of removing settings, some design tactics I've found useful in building software: 1. Provide multiple default settings profiles. E.g., beginner, advanced, and expert. The problem with a single, rigid configuration is that you can't satisfy all user types. On the other hand, acknowledging that not every user wants to fiddle with settings, providing a quick way to more closely match their needs via multiple default profiles is a win. 2. Always provide settings import and export, or some form of settings synchronization between instances. One of the main reasons users don't use settings is that they are exhausted by having to re-apply all of their preferences every time they install your app. I've installed Firefox about a hundred times across many computers. If I had to manually adjust it to my preferences, re-install and configure add-ons, and so on, I'd just give up and use more of the defaults. The idea of having to re-train NoScript alone is unbearable. 3. Provide better descriptions of what settings do and why they are offered. This can be inline help within the settings dialog or "show me" buttons, or whatever. A good example you're probably familiar with are video game options panels that say things like, "Enabling this may help increase framerate in the following circumstances: ..." Firefox is similarly pretty good about this. But many apps don't give the user much explanation for settings, adopting a more "if you know, you know" attitude. Don't assume that because your user is a "layperson" that they can't understand what your app's settings do if you take the time to explain them.

max49 5y ago
>The problem with a single, rigid configuration is that you can't satisfy all user types. From a user point of view, the problem is that satisfying beginners will get more click/impression/downloads/etc.. If the company is managed by accountants, you end up with products that get shittier every version.

adamleithp 5y ago

Side note: linear’s website especially the home page, makes my iPhone 11 crash when zooming in and out. Firefox Daylight 39.0 (6519) Crazy.

xg15 5y ago

I love settings. I hate losing settings and having to fiddle with everything all over again. I remember, back in pre-windows XP days, me and some of my friends would spend ages going through the appearance options and customisimg pretty much everything. Even later, I knew of people who had a meticulous desktop ordering or spent substantial amount of time ordering favourite icons in the browser. All that was great fun until the first time, the settings were lost. Maybe you had to reinstall the OS (or got a new PC) or maybe the program updated and simply erased the settings. In any case, trying to redo everything you had arranged before looked to be an enormous amount of work and not fun at all. So after the second time, this happened, we gave up and accepted the standard. But this eas not because we didn't want customisation, it was because the experience was too frustrating. My impression is that in modern UX, not only do opportunities for customisation become less and less, the results are also increasingly ephemeral. E.g., there is still no option under Windows to save the arrangement of desktop icons - but there is a menu shortcut which will instantly rearrange everything and render your own arrangement moot. I think this shows a pretty clear priority of the designers. My impression is that customisation opportunities are simply conflicting with a lot of priorites of moders software developers, much more so than their users: Companies want the freedom to frequently change the UI and control overy tiny detail about the "experience" - customisation runs directly counter to that. In some extreme cases, companies even want the freedom to build deliberately unpleasant designs (dark patterns). Additionally, an inflexible UI also provides more opportunity to present some minor improvements as significant new features ("twitter now has three different colour schemes!", "iOS now can show two apps at the same time!"). Last but not least, an inflexible UI lets you actually sell certain adjustments as a premium feature - e.g. YouTube letting you listen to a video in the background. All of this are strong incentives for software companies to get rid of settings, but none of it has to do with users not liking settings.

gknoy 5y ago
It seems like a good reason to have settings be something that are _automatically exported / stored_, so that you can put them in version control and re-fetch them later, or at least export/import.
- 5y ago

flenserboy 5y ago

Being able to change settings is fantastic. ResEdit taught me that being able to do more than that is even better.

ptx 5y ago

> One of the small preferences we introduced in the Linear app is not displaying the mouse cursor pointer over links. We want to mimic the feeling you natively have on the desktop with our Mac app. Hmm. This might actually be an example of settings as a result of design failure. The text in the screenshot describes the setting as applying not just to links but to "any interactive element". But most native desktop apps (which they're trying to mimic) would use a special cursor for links and a regular mouse cursor for other interactive elements, so it seems that (by entangling links and other interactive elements) the setting allows a choice of two incorrect behaviours instead of just behaving correctly by default.

enra 5y ago
The text is maybe confusing but how it works is that the setting is either "Native" or "Web" style. Native means that interactive elements like toolbar items, nav or icons are just show the regular cursor and links in text use the pointer (Mail app) Web style is what is common with many web apps and sites where every interactive element uses the pointer (Slack). The reason for the setting that people seem to be one way or the other on which they are used to.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  Are you using one of "pointer" or "cursor" (which are synonyms, to me[1]) to refer to either an I-beam cursor, or the hand cursor, commonly used to indicate a clickable hyperlink? (I actually dislike how text in native apps doesn't often permit the use of I-beam; it'd be a lot easier to copy/paste errors if one could highlight them.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointe...
  - paulirish 5y ago
    In CSS, the hand cursor is called a 'pointer' cursor, so I think that's what was intended. For anyone who hasn't internalized this, including the app's users, I imagine this is quite confusing. :) IIUC 'regular cursor' is just the default mouse cursor. I don't think anyone meant the I-beam/text cursor, but I agree with your selection comment entirely.

jdub 5y ago

Don't make me tap the sign. https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html

frickinLasers 5y ago
Ugh. As a not-really-power user I can't stand Gnome 3, not least because I have to Google how to and then install a tool just to make useful settings accessible. Everything in Tweaks should be in the default settings panel.
- p_l 5y ago
  I remember I dumped GNOME around 2.4, due to discussions about print UI and how close to every setting should be removed from it, possibly retained in Gconf. At the time there was still the idea that "sure, we lost a lot of settings and features in rewrite between 1.4 and 2.0, but we're going to add them back"... and the printing discussion gave me red alert of moving to "developers know best". The further evolution of GNOME only reinforced that feeling.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  That is exactly Mac for me.
_2paq 5y ago
Ah yes, the "every preference has a cost" philosophy which leads people into deciding things like that everyone on Earth is ok with a One True Colorscheme (Adwaita) and a One True Font (Cantarell). People who suffer from halation due to the contrast of the dark version of Adwaita and people who like fonts besides Cantarell don't exist.

nitwit005 5y ago

The other reason for settings seems to be turning off things that the UI designers insisted on, but which all actual customers hate. See the display density (amount of whitespace) option in Salesforce for an example of this.

paxys 5y ago

It's nice to have settings, but you also absolutely need to have defaults which work for the vast majority of the user base who will never open the settings menu.

jrm4 5y ago

That is is even a question shows how broken this entire field is, and is everything I hate about modern software development. It really should not be the goal of "design" to try to create "one experience fits all," because when you do that you create the lowest common denominator, the dumbest experience possible. If you care at all about allowing grownups to do grownup things with their software; if you care that people should be allowed to push themselves to their own technical and mental limits in order to get things done in a good way for them at all, then yes, you need to allow for things like "settings."

overgard 5y ago
One thing that always frustrates me is that most "redesigns" end up removing useful settings, or hiding them. Hiding complexity doesn't make software less complex to use, it just makes it harder to find what you're looking for.
- zepolen 5y ago
  Sure but think about if a particular setting is used by 0.1% of the user base but takes up 5% of the real estate and confuses the 99.9% of users that have no idea what it is and no intention of ever using it.
  - Underphil 5y ago
    But that 0.1% may actually need that setting for the product to work for them. By all means hide the settings, but don't remove them entirely. A lot of evidence seems to support advanced users having a proclivity toward tweaking, so something like about:config in the browser seems to work fine (as an example).
  - SrslyJosh 5y ago
    Here's what you said, minus the arbitrary numbers: > Sure but think about if a particular setting is used by a minority of the user base but takes up some of the real estate and confuses the majority of users that have no idea what it is and no intention of ever using it. Now that we've removed the arbitrary numbers... ;-) If the way setting is presented is confusing, then that is the problem that needs to be fixed. Remove the confusion, maybe make it less prominent in the UI, but taking away the setting doesn't actually solve the problem, it just breaks the product for the users who need it.

stormking 5y ago

I love settings, browsing the settings screen gives me a feeling about how mighty a software is. Software without settings is usually very shallow, only supporting a handful of usecases. But in the modern SaaS world, they still want to charge 5 bucks per month. No thanks.

awinter-py 5y ago

settings are also a great resolution to behind-the-scenes design conversations in particular the classic 'PM wants to incentivize a flow, developer thinks it will be annoying as shit and threatens to throw phone out the window' 'let's make this a setting to see if people turn it off' is my favorite compromise for these. (Also simplifies phase two of a gradual rollout, because jealous early adopters can turn the beta setting on manually)

scrozier 5y ago

This article, and many of the comments here, commits a central mistake: declaring things to be true with no evidence. "Users love settings." Umm, prove it. Even more glaring, the author goes on to use his own anecdotal story to make his point. If there's one thing I've learned in decades in software development (and there's not), it's that my opinion is not a satisfactory proxy for "what everyone thinks/does."

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

The author is correct, but it's sad that he had to say that. I am not thrilled with "inviolate rules of thumb," as a general principle. Don't get me wrong. I have been doing what I do for a very long time, and have developed a huge library of habits, practices, and heuristics, in my work. It's just that I treat them as guidelines, as opposed to "Thou Shalt Not" commandments. If an old or obscure pattern fits the bill for what I am doing now, I use it. If the problem looks, but is not exactly, like an issue that I have solved in the past, I will see if I can adjust the old solution to fit today's conundrum; even if the old solution is in a "Thou Shalt Not" area. If a current buzzword du jour is nonsensical in my work, I don't use it; no matter how good it looks on my CV. Basically, because of my experience, I am allowed to color outside the lines. A lot of times, I need to look at what others have done, and, if I am not an expert in their field, I have a lot less flexibility in what I can do. For example, in the app I'm developing, the core functionality is pretty much done, and it's time to start gussying it up, putting some lipstick on the porker, theming it, what-have-you. I was originally trained as an artist, but that was a long time ago, and my stuff tended to have a rather "prime color" palette. Think "Magpie on LSD." I don't trust my own design sense, when it comes to a palette. I need to look at what others have done. I won't be able to deviate much, as I don't have their design sense. I don't do "subtle," too well...

deleted 5y ago

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bigcat123 5y ago

jesprenj 5y ago

Is it just me or does the website flash with content for a second which is then replaced with a fake "Not found" display? I'm on my phone so I'll not debug anything right now.

atoav 5y ago

I love settings. It is the first thing I open if I start a new program. It tells me about the maturity of the program. Whether it is a toy or something really well thought out.

Graffur 5y ago
I would imagine the overlap between people who love settings and people on HN is quite large :) I also love settings with the exception of web browsers for some reason.

mmphosis 5y ago

Using the word "Settings" is a design failure. For example, when I right click on my so-called modern desktop, there is a longish drop down menu with a "Desktop Settings..." menu item in it which goes to a window named "Desktop" and defaults to the Background tab. On my more antiquated OS, the menu item is named "Change Desktop Background..." which seems more obvious / discoverable.

CRConrad 5y ago
> a "Desktop Settings..." menu item in it which goes to a window named "Desktop" and defaults to the Background tab. On my more antiquated OS, the menu item is named "Change Desktop Background..." which seems more obvious / discoverable. So the newer settings dialogue changes more stuff about the desktop than just the background? How would the menu label "Change Desktop Background..." make all that other stuff more obvious or discoverable than "Desktop Settings"?

pimlottc 5y ago

“Users love settings” Author then goes on to talk about their own personal love of settings and does not offer any evidence that their actual users want settings. Whether settings are good or bad depends ENTIRELY on your specific users and their specific needs. Blanket statements like this based entirely on one particular designer’s feelings are not particularly convincing.

errcorrectcode 5y ago

It's a common antipattern to design away settings, and practical usability, with artistic purity. OTOH, providing an endless jumble of uncommon settings is overwhelming to almost everyone. 1. Make things work in the common-most use-cases, for power users and novices. I think there's a lack of respect shown to people who have difficult, edge-case, real problems to solve, like batch receiving orders while being forced into narrow pagination and sparse layouts suitable only for casual customers. Usable search and bulk actions are needed in more contexts than originally assumed. 2. If someone asks for it, there could be 100 who didn't speak-up but also want it. 3. Organize and explain settings succinctly. 4. Have a reset to defaults option.

strictfp 5y ago

A good "setting" is something that's part of the normal UI. Take brush size in Photoshop as a simple example. You obviously don't want to set that in some control panel. So you just integrate it into the main UI. I think one should strive to do the same with most settings.

davikrr 5y ago

Every time an application (i.e Firefox) removes a feature due to "low user adoption" I feel the extents of this kind of UX misunderstanding.

SrslyJosh 5y ago

> While I was reorganizing my phone, I had a sudden realization: Settings are typically seen as the result of design failure. The thinking goes that as designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustments by the user. Consequently, offering customization options is interpreted as a failure to make firm product decisions. I wonder if the author has ever considered how much users hate when things arbitrarily change as designers try to figure out what the One True Product Experience should be. (Or, more likely, try to optimize some metric management is unhappy about.)

karmakaze 5y ago

The thing I most dislike about settings is that many products once they create settings for a thing then don't put thought into sensible defaults with the logic, "oh they can just change that". So in a way settings can be a crutch.

franciscop 5y ago

Design tip: don't load a 4000px image into a 800px container, it's very wasteful for everyone involved. Or maybe provide some settings so I can adjust it? :)

jmull 5y ago

Users love settings for things they care about… and abhor and ignore settings on things they don’t care about. Better get your defaults right. That is: don’t force your users to answer questions they don’t know the answer to. Also, partition your settings by user concern… that is, don’t confront your users with a bunch of questions they don’t understand or care about (even if the defaults are right).

fito 5y ago

Just a little bit dumbed down, but this is the absolute correct take. Settings are design features, not bugs. Settings are beneficial to diverse kinds of humans.

cletus 5y ago

I mostly disagree with this. To quote Joel Spolsky [1]: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. At least the author differentiates on types of settings: > There’s a difference between product settings that a product needs to get right by default and preferences that designers deliberately shouldn’t have a strong opinion on. I can get on board with separating cosmetic choices and non-cosmetic settings. If you're shipping a product, every setting is a potential bug because you don't test that particular setting necessarily. Worse, every combination of settings is a potential bug. Ideally, settings shouldn't allow you to put your product in an invalid state. That almost always happens with any nontrivial set of non-cosmetic settings however. I've brought up this example many times but many here won't remember the early days of connecting to Wifi. On Windows this meant answering questions like: - Encryption type (eg None, WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2, WPA2-PSK) - Passphrase (is this a password? Is it something else? Well, that depends on the encryption type) - SSID Apple came along and reduced this to SSID and password. The principle I take from this is never, ever ask users to enter something that you can figure out on your own. Like you can figure out the Wifi encryption type so why ask? Another example: why ask me for a state and a ZIP code? The ZIP code tells you the state. Settings so often fall into this bucket. You have settings for things that don't make sense, that you can figure out the answer to and are dependent on other settings. Practically speaking, settings become a cultural disease because product and UI/UX people can't agree and someone "compromises" by saying "let's make it a setting" rather than figuring out the right answer. Design is the art of compromise. Settings are the art of not making a decision. [1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

spacexsucks 5y ago
All of those features that he poo poohs in there are useful and I used them as a newb on Windows. This is Bs gospel. Sure I have had people ask me "dumb" questions but removing the customizavility is not the answer. Your examples are valid except when zip code lookup fails or wifi lookup is not correct and the systems tries to think for me. It takes away that option. This thinking is a disease and the reason I am left with half assed systems that i ahve to work around for my friends and family everyday. A friend felt dumb for not knowing how to plugin a line out cable on her iphone because apple decided 3.5 mm is outdated. I told her she isnt dumb and it is not her job to know that. This is thinking is causing more dumbing down of people than anything else. My parents feel dumb for not knowing how to use a smartphone. The dumb android dialer calls randomly and goes to background with no way to hangup. My dad cant figure out what to touch to close it. With a physical button he can close it easy. Windows phone was miles ahead than latest ios and android in call screen which is what a phone should be for. So are "feature" phones. As a cutting tech engineer, I prefer those over the ad mining machines that are iOS and android My mom feels dumb for not knowing how to order on a website because everything now requires a login which requires a unique password and 2fa and a unique workflow with godawful hidden icons that every UX team wants to lay their marks on and eveything useful gets moved to the overflow menu, the gear or hamburger on some random side of the page. Just have clear wordings with accelerator keys and tab bindings Also because Joel spolsky is right on some things, doesnt mean we should listen to Everything he says. That leads to a monoculture and people are different and diverse. So should be designs. They should be more accomodating of differences, isntead of the current my way or the highway of restricted UXs and walled gardens

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

Does he understand the idea right? The program shouldn't require a change in settings in order to work: it should have reasonably workable default settings. This doesn't preclude customization at all.

yread 5y ago

settings are also a liability, a form of technical debt. When you add new settings you have to make sure it works with every (logical) combination of other settings. And you need to keep doing it in the future possibly forever because users hate settings being removed. So, your tests get bigger, adding new features and especially settings becomes costlier.I try to avoid it as much as I can

asddubs 5y ago

My take: Settings are a last resort. The more settings you have, the less likely a user is to actually find the one they need. So some settings are good, but too many are bad. E.g. dark mode is a setting that just makes sense because different users have different preferences. But it's quite easy to measure what settings almost no one is using, and to axe those. In other cases you may be able to figure out a smarter way to offer the functionality without a checkbox hidden away in a settings page

mschuster91 5y ago
> But it's quite easy to measure what settings almost no one is using, and to axe those. The chance is high that the "almost no one" group is actually the ones that use your app the most. Casual users won't care much about some setting five layers deep in the menu, but the ones who are dedicated enough to actually find it will care. The constant "optimization" by taking features away that "no one" uses is what drives so many users away from installing updates. Please stop that bullshit. I'd like to not fear updates again.
- asddubs 5y ago
  Ha, I knew I would get called out on that. To be honest, in my specific case, I doubt it, I've removed some pretty pointless legacy settings which only had minor cosmetic effects. I know this stuff is in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes there genuinely are settings that someone asked for a decade ago that no one else really wanted, or possibly wasn't even what the person asking meant. But the way this usually works on our app is that the setting is just removed for anyone who has it set to the default value at that moment, so people who previously changed it won't have their stuff messed with.
mmis1000 5y ago
Firefox forcely remove the separator between tabs in new design because users won't open too many tab in general, and they won't make the tab too small to differ. And I fxxking hate it. Because I am the user that will open many tab and make the tab small. So does this mean I should not use firefox because I use it wrong? It's really a shitty attitude if you are exactly the one that they claims 'not-important'. Pray for you not being lucky enough to be the one 'not-important' if you don't know the pain yet.

andyjohnson0 5y ago

I had a realisation a while ago that one of the first things I do when I start using a new app, or after a significant update, is to look at the settings. It gives me a feel for the "functionality space" of the application and helps me visualise its "boundaries" somehow. Different ways of presenting properties seem to make this harder or easier: I find Android to be less good and (for example) Visual Studio and Lightroom to be better. I'm not sure why. Does anyone else do this?

kubami 5y ago
I came to say the same thing. Although I would never be able to put is so eloquently into words. For me this goes further. Anytime I rent a car I browse settings. "Oh cool, this car has lane-assist, and radar-powered cruise control". People look at me weird. I think this is the same mindset that drew me to linux 20 years ago, when compiling and tweaking your own gentoo was not-crazy. "Let's just say, if your VCR is blinking 12:00 linux is not for you"

dusted 5y ago

Spend time to design the defaults. Make sure that most users won't ever have to change a thing, but always, always have the settings, and always mark what the default value is, so if someone messes it up, they can find their way back. Forcing the user to make decisions because it was hard or annoying to find a good default decision is why some people have come to hate settings. I hate being forced to create a configuration. I love being allowed to change one.

eternityforest 5y ago

In some cases they are. Global config needed to support a local module(As in a PHP app depending on proper Apache conf) kinda sucks because it can create conflicts that can only be solved manually or with a container. Settings that can't be done via GUI suck. I shouldn't have to dig through some other app and copy and paste an IP address to use your thing. Settings should not have to change for common activities. US vs Metric should be a document property. I should not have to change settings to properly view a certain document. Settings without sane defaults suck too. A good setting is "Here's a discovery server, but you can change it". A crappy setting is "Select an API version for this global daemon that 5 other things use, and only 3 can work at the same time". Anything that can by dynamic and autodetected... probably should be unless there's a really good reason.

cestith 5y ago

It is both possible and desirable to build into a product a strong set of assumptions and useful defaults which can be easily overridden when your assumptions do not hold for every case. The problem with settings and option flags is when a user needs to set a great deal of them to get anything done. Smart defaults for the common case are useful. Overrides for the uncommon case expand that utility to more cases. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, a pragmatic and helpful combination. Have defaults. Allow overrides of them.

winrid 5y ago

Oh, well that's good. We have one or two or hundred settings... https://docs.fastcomments.com/guide-customizations-and-configuration.html https://docs.fastcomments.com/guide-customizations-and-confi...

blooalien 5y ago

One of the reasons I love the KDE desktop environment on Linux is because it has settings available to customize nearly everything about it, but it has good default settings out of the box, so you don't have to customize much, but any time you want to customize something, you can go dig around in the settings and find it and change it easily to fit your needs. That's honestly the way it should be. Good settings by default for users who like to just use things as they are, but options readily available to easily change things if you want to.

antpls 5y ago

No one mentioned video games settings? It's a solved problem there, have profiles : "Low", "Medium", "High", "Ultra High". They allow for a quick start, then as the user is more aware of the feature, the user can tune the predefined profiles themselves. You can have independent profiles for each independent feature : input profiles (keyboard/gamepads), graphics profiles, audio profiles, etc For example, on a Google account, that would be a single drop down list with those options: "Private and no personalized experience" (everything turned off), "Private with personalized experience", "Public"