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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 h

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.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    Yes yes yes. You've nailed it so well that I can hardly believe it. I've worked first-hand with a number of different teams and this is exactly what happens. Around the time I started becoming aware of this, I once brought up in a meeting that I thought we should support keyboard shortcuts for users who prefer keyboard interaction. You would have thought I had desecrated a religious symbol. I did figure out a hack though. The next time we met I pretended like the previous conversation had never happened, and instead brought up that for a11y we really needed keyboard shortcuts :-D They had no choice but to agree because prioritizing a11y is another religious tenet. I love a good win-win/two birds/etc.
    - mark-r 5y ago
      The last product I worked on, we had constant problems sometimes trying to reproduce bugs. Accessing a feature through a keyboard shortcut vs. a menu might take you down a completely different code path, and it was critical to know which way the user was using.
      - freedomben 5y ago
        Yes I agree, although having gone through that several times in different frameworks, I am now a believer that you can avoid the majority of issues like that by keeping state centralized (like redux pattern) and building components in a functional-reactive way (no state in components). Of course this doesn't help much if you're using Java Swing, but the vast majority of products that I run into this are web-based. The "always re-render" approach of React can help a ton. With that you have two separate event handlers (one for the click, one for the key press) but both of them simply update the "state" variable for whatever it is. The framework then figures out what needs to change and does it.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Sounds like a poor design. The events should call the same function.
  - mrandish 5y ago
- userbinator 5y ago
  I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success. I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources. Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763
raxxorrax 5y ago
I think it is wrong to optimize for such users since those are more likely to swallow anything anyway. But you also need to capture the more versed crowd, which will also be required to support the casual users. Have as much settings as you want, sensible defaults are important though.
Gigachad 5y ago
Settings are like lines of comments or the weight of an aeroplane. Less is better but sometimes it can’t be avoided. I just hate having to configure things though because I always lose my configuration when I change device or have to factory reset so I’d rather change my expectations to match the defaults than to configure something.
- simion314 5y ago
  Nobody forces you to change the defaults, if your IDE has a color scheme you don't like you can continue using it, change your own preferences then using a menu and a popup to select a different color scheme. The thing is some users want to change things and some developers are even capable to implement things without hard coding various constants. Most issues appears when designers (like GNOME ones) want to impose a brand or vision. Good apps will store configuration in a folder/file and they offer import/export functionality. As a person with eye sight problems I would be unable to do my job if a shit designer could force is shitty font sizes and colors on my apps(for some reason slim fonts with light gray on white background is sexy in recent years) TL:DR nobody forces you to open the settings panel, keep the defaults and don't try to demand or defend removing stuff you personally don't need, you don't understand how other work(use the applications)
  - larsrc 5y ago
    All too often, especially in the open source world, settings are used as a way to not figure out how to make a good default. When the default is crap, I am forced to go to the settings and spend way too much time finding my way around a gazillion possibilities.
    - simion314 5y ago
      >All too often, especially in the open source world, settings are used as a way to not figure out how to make a good default. When the default is crap, I am forced to go to the settings and spend way too much time finding my way around a gazillion possibilities. IS there any evidence for this? Like what should be the default font or font size? Is there evidence that there is such a good default? The problem is you want that the good defaults match your preferences without proof that those defaults are good, Sure there are exceptions where evil or big ego people will force their preference over what the users want. Do you play video games? , if yes don't you think that sometimes you need to adjust the sound volume, font sizes, difficulty to match you? Do you listen to radio ? Isn't great you can adjust the volume or change the station? Do you use and IDE ? isn't great that you can change the color scheme, the code formatting scheme, the keyboard shortcuts, that you can install plugins to add more features to help you with your work? True story, I installed for my son an emulator and installed a game he wanted to play, after a few hours I ask about the game and he tells me that the controller buttons were weird/reversed but he got used to that. I then went in the menus and found the setting where he could have change those buttons so he do not have to suffer and rewire his muscle memory, the conclusion is we need to teach people to not be afraid to think "this software should work differently, let me check for a setting instead of torturing myself". P.S was not the emulator program fault, it could not have a default that worked for all game and controller combinations.
mostlysimilar 5y ago
You may be correct that "most people" don't love settings, but I think we underestimate how many power users there are in the wild. I personally prefer software to be customizable and give me a lot of options to configure and get what I want out of it. There are a lot of people who are willing to engage with your software and use their critical thinking skills in that process. I think we're losing something valuable by dumbing down all software and all interfaces to the lowest common denominator in the pursuit of "no friction" for users. Some friction is totally fine.
- somehnguy 5y ago
  It doesn’t even have to add friction. Optimize away for the common use case, that’s great and benefits the power user just as much. Just let people make changes if they really feel the need.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I find it weird that people think settings are only for power users. Good defaults are very important for non-power-users. But if a non-power-user can Google their problem and change a setting to fix it, then that's a lot better than said user being left with no options at all.
  - vkk8 5y ago
    By some definition, a person who does anything besides swearing when a piece of software doesn't work as expected is already a power user. I see this in many of my relatives. Googling the problem or checking the settings menu is something I do when asked to fix a technical problem in a piece of software I have never seen or used before and this more than they did before handing the problem to me.
- supreme_berry 5y ago
- xmprt 5y ago
  I believe that the way forward isn't complex UIs or things like ribbons. Command palettes [1] solve most of the problems of discoverability while also helping power users by giving them quick access through shortcuts or highly configurable settings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373536
hwers 5y ago
I guess what's going on here, the reason people are divided, is that on software that you dislike (or are forced to use) people generally hate settings and just want the thing to work. On software that people love (like a piece of software that helps you make music or edit video) then people generally enjoy being able to customize it further and further.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  Exactly. Look at something like a video game. The customization in an MMO needs to be drastically different than pong. Settings are not a binary good/evil.
- larsrc 5y ago
  Nope. Two of my favourite pieces of software have very few settings because they remember what I do instead of forcing me to go and figure out a setting for it.
  - funcDropShadow 5y ago
    Could you explain that? Software that tries to interpret what users are doing and then tries to adapt to itself is on a slippery slope. The first steps in that direction, like a history of visited sites, or recently edited files menu are uncontroversial. But when it moves menu entries around to optimize for assumed workflow of the user, that user gets infuriated very fast. Software that I cannot adapt to my needs is like an interactive tv. Ultimately I have no control over what is happening. Software that I can adapt to my needs puts the personal in Personal Computer.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Do you mean "like [non-] interactive TV"?
      - funcDropShadow 5y ago
        yes
User23 5y ago
I think this is also an interesting observation for physical objects too. I wouldn’t say I like to muck with the settings, but I’d consider it a critical design flaw if my desk chair didn’t let me. Same with my car’s seat, steering wheel, and so on. It does make one wonder though to what extent automating that customization optimally might be possible. It would be cool if every time a different driver sat in the car the mirrors, seat, wheel, and whatever else automatically adjusted for maximum comfort and safety.
- asoneth 5y ago
  I like your metaphor. A desk chair with no ability to customize is too constrained. One with dozens of dials and knobs is far too fiddly, at least for me. There is a happy medium with just the right amount of configuration for most people.
  - simion314 5y ago
    But most of good apps have the Settings split in categories and advanced sections, you are not forced to see or touch them. It is not like in real world where many options would have to mean 100 buttons,switches and levers always existing there in your face.
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I agree that it's easier to have more hidden options in software than in hardware, though my recollection from my IT days was that the "Advanced" section in the settings panel seems to attract the kind of people who have no business changing advanced settings. (Personally I like how Firefox hides them under "about:config" with a warning.) Having said that, hidden/advanced settings still have a nonzero cost.
      - simion314 5y ago
        Sure. there is a cost but iumagine a GNOME dev /designer getting his hands ona video game: 1 remove the difficulty level settings, we keep medium , like only a small percent use the Super hard so fuck the those customers 2 remove brightness sittings, the game is calibrated for the desgner expensive screen 3 remove settings for FOV, bloom,shitty effects, we force teh customer to endure our preferences, if they fill sick fuck them, they can refund 4 remove Controls settings, we see what most people use and we force everyone to use that, if someone does not like it they can use a third party hacking program to customize the cntrols. 5 Sound and Music volumte, remove them, the Speackers and headphones have buttons for this, the OS has buttons for this... ..... Sure settings cost but removing or not adding them is a "fuck you" to the customer, you can get away with it if you either are GNOME and your product is forced as default , or if you have no competitors that can provide a similar product with better defaults, options and features. Btw I am talking about real features and not how round your button corner is, at my work we had 1 customer requesting our app be able to process TRL(right to left) input and output, we probably had 10000 users but we implemented this feature for this 1 customer because we realized that we can do it and we could gain more customers if we have this feature. Now you have an extra button/checkbox for the RTL option in the GUI , the problem is not that this feature exist maybe the problem is the designer that is not competent ernough to make this RTL button fit nicely in the GUI.
Tagbert 5y ago
Having good defaults are a benefit and if done well most people don't need to fiddle with settings. For those who are not satisfied with the defaults you have chosen, having settings to customize things can defuse what would otherwise turn into frustration. Even if your defaults are 90% right for 90% of the people, they are likely to each have a different 10% that they are dissatisfied with.
dfxm12 5y ago
People love when software does what they need, and some of them will be willing to fiddle with settings if they have to. Settings can be well designed or poorly designed though. In a way, settings are really part of the design and should be thought of as such. If the settings are obvious to find and obvious in utility, it's not a matter of willingness to fiddle, it's just part of using the software.
nirvdrum 5y ago
I'm not a designer, but I have done a fair bit with HCI for whatever that's worth. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", which I understood to be a seminal text in the UX world. In it, Norman argues that no one-size-fits-all product actually fits all and leaving off 1% of the population is still a rather large number of people, so in the spirit of human-centered designed you should provide options or settings to support those people as well. I've been struggling to reconcile that with UX of many software products in the time since. The modern UX ethos seems to be that settings indicate a failing of the product and if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else. I think the book also makes the argument that constantly breaking workflows isn't very user-friendly either, but SaaS products routinely change their UI and workflows around. I suppose I can see the business justification for that, but that doesn't necessarily make it good UX. Of course, Norman could just be wrong or my interpretation of his text could be wrong. Either way, something feels off to me with modern UX. I suppose if you've run actual user studies (not just A/B tests), then you have more contextual data than I do. But, I came away from reading the book really wishing more software products (both SaaS and the recent spat of "opinionated" frameworks/tools) followed the principles he championed.
- bo1024 5y ago
  It's simple. Most software today is not created to serve the user. It is created to accomplish certain goals (e.g. obtaining money, attention, data, or prestige from the user) and only serves the user as incidental to accomplish those goals.
  - nirvdrum 5y ago
    I think that's probably true in the SaaS world. I'm seeing the same mentality take hold in the open source world with "opinionated" or "curated" software. Tools that have limited options or actively remove options and expect the developer to conform to them. I think it's being driven by this same notion of "options = bad" that we see in UX in general, but maybe they're coincidental, but unrelated phenomena.
    - 5y ago
phil-martin 5y ago
One persons settings are another persons feature. For example, my kids endlessly change the icons, colours, sound and many other visual and functional behaviour of their phones, the vast majority of which I would consider ‘settings’. But for them it’s highly important and fun The defaults are fine for me, but changing those settings isn’t a cost to them, it’s just plain fun. It’s easy to dismiss that as not real work, but I see the same in workplaces. Being able to customise your tools to be that little bit more bearable can sometimes be the difference between having a great day and crappy day at work. A little bit of control can feel very empowering.
- supreme_berry 5y ago
- ramoz 5y ago
  This is exactly what I’ve seen with serious enterprise applications. Where users perform some complex task all day in the software. “User Preferences” are first order feature inclusions. They vary across global levels and down to specific feature settings. I’ve seen multiple occasions of customized layout/grid solutions. One random thing I’ve wondered is if Excel power users end up implementing a ton of preference customizations. Otherwise it seems like a very well equipped “default-only” UX.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  This was true with Windows 3.1. When I finally installed it I soon bought theme packs and delighted it making it into an expression of my interests. Accessibility was also much improved over DOS and even GEM and Geoworks. Moving to OS X was such a disappointment in comparison.
eitland 5y ago
> 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. Exactly. Don't think about settings as a failure. Use reasonable defaults and let users override them in a reasonable way.
dgb23 5y ago
Fully agreed. Imagine there were no mouse/controller sensitivity settings for example. These and many other settings can have huge impact on how usable something is.
overgard 5y ago
I'm not sure that's true. I usually am far more frustrated when something in an OS isn't customizable. One reason I prefer Linux and Windows over macOS is because macOS tends to be much more rigid in what I can customize.
lillecarl 5y ago
I mean it's an issue tracking system not an app for the masses.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> 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. Or a setting that once set doesn't stay set. If I arrange the settings for something, especially part of a UI, I do not expect those setting to go back to defaults every time an update happens. Somewhere between functionality and not having functionally is only maintaining functionality through constant user effort to rebuild settings. Like the rental car I had that constantly reset the heated steering wheel every time I got in. I don't want you to be on. I told you I do not want you on. So stop turning yourself on every time. THGTTG predicted this frustration decades ago (the Nutrimatic drink machine scene).
echelon 5y ago
> Most people don't love fiddling with settings. Passive consumers don't. Power users, domain experts, creators, engineers, and owners love settings.
peteradio 5y ago
Most people aren't engineers. Depending on the software you might have people begging for settings.
thawaya3113 5y ago
This does not track with anyone I have met in real life. People have no problem with settings as long as the settings are reasonably easy to understand and actually help solve the problems they have. In fact, Apple setup a store that did nothing but sold settings…the iPhone ringtone setting. Other countries have had mobile companies selling more settings. Wallpapers, hello tunes (messages that play when you call someone instead of a ringtone), etc. Settings are not inherently bad. Unnecessary settings and bad defaults are bad.
wtetzner 5y ago
That’s the thing. Not everyone wants the same thing. Provide useful settings, but try to pick the defaults such that most people won’t have to change settings.
bluedino 5y ago
That's actually a big part of the Android/iPhone debate
rapind 5y ago
Yes, I think it really depends on what the software does and what I'm using it for (my willingness to invest time). If it's something I use every day for years on end to make a living, then I probably want to be able to tweak and customize it (and I won't mind doing it). Just don't make me keep doing it because your evergreen software keeps updating and changing how things work. If it's something I "barely" use, then I have absolutely no interest in customizing it. It should just work. For example, if all I want to do is securely share a file with someone, then don't make me jump through hoops to use it. If however I was looking for software that let me share organized groups of files, should sort in a specific way, would expire after a certain amount of time, and to track engagement with these files (downloads / views), then are probably a few settings I will want to tweak. What I think often happens is software will evolve / pivot to do more (maybe sometimes less?) then it was originally designed to do. Unfortunately that evolution some times lacks a different design perspective. You might have been religious about clean and simple in the original product, but now it's a bit more nuanced, and you'll need to be more flexible. I don't think there's an easy solution. We just need to recognize that as features are added, design still needs to be part of that process.
idiocrat 5y ago
Good default settings and good auto-tuning functions are welcome. The cars are delivered with handbrakes on, wrapped in with wrapping paper/red ribbon. Some people do not realize they need to release the handbrakes and remove the wrapping paper. They are driving for years with default settings, wondering why the mileage is bad and it smells like burned brake pads.
bane 5y ago
I once inherited a software product that had an incredibly complicated data import process that non/semi-technical users were supposed to be able to use. The training for the product spent almost half a day on learning this process (before anything else in the software!) and it was often in the top-3 of user support issues. I set about analyzing the problem over a period of a week or so and documented my findings with some recommendations. It ultimately boiled down to far too many settings, most of which were footguns, and no sane defaults that served most users most of the time. In the end, I instructed the development team to make a number of changes which were mostly around picking defaults, or having the import process use some heuristics to make a reasonable guess, but letting users override them if the software did something wrong -- we modeled very heavily off of various MS-Office import processes, particularly MS-Access and MS-Excel. We ended up getting what was something like a 40+ step process down to 3 clicks that more or less eliminated the support tail and turned training into a 3-5 minute show and tell. One of the problems with lots of software IMHO is the lack of sane defaults, the blizzard of hard to grok options and settings, and the multitude of ways of doing nearly-exactly the same thing.
whateveracct 5y ago
Framing settings as pure cost is so wrongheaded. Sometimes, there's multiple viable ways to use a piece of software. That's settings. That's facts.
syshum 5y ago
Even worse is having been able to tweak the functional for DECADES only to have a random update remove those settings... Looking at you Microsoft
nspattak 5y ago
There is nothing wrong with configurable parameters. What users hate are fighting with settings. In my experience this involves two things: more technical people know what they want to configure but don't know "where the fuck in the settings it is" or less technical people who know what they want to do but do not know that it can be configured/where to do so.

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.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Yes yes yes. You've nailed it so well that I can hardly believe it. I've worked first-hand with a number of different teams and this is exactly what happens. Around the time I started becoming aware of this, I once brought up in a meeting that I thought we should support keyboard shortcuts for users who prefer keyboard interaction. You would have thought I had desecrated a religious symbol. I did figure out a hack though. The next time we met I pretended like the previous conversation had never happened, and instead brought up that for a11y we really needed keyboard shortcuts :-D They had no choice but to agree because prioritizing a11y is another religious tenet. I love a good win-win/two birds/etc.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    The last product I worked on, we had constant problems sometimes trying to reproduce bugs. Accessing a feature through a keyboard shortcut vs. a menu might take you down a completely different code path, and it was critical to know which way the user was using.
    - freedomben 5y ago
      Yes I agree, although having gone through that several times in different frameworks, I am now a believer that you can avoid the majority of issues like that by keeping state centralized (like redux pattern) and building components in a functional-reactive way (no state in components). Of course this doesn't help much if you're using Java Swing, but the vast majority of products that I run into this are web-based. The "always re-render" approach of React can help a ton. With that you have two separate event handlers (one for the click, one for the key press) but both of them simply update the "state" variable for whatever it is. The framework then figures out what needs to change and does it.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Sounds like a poor design. The events should call the same function.
- mrandish 5y ago
userbinator 5y ago
I don’t like UIs where i can search only for 1-5, 6-20, 21 and more. This, absolutely this! I recently had to use a web app whose date filtering consisted of nothing but "1 day ago; 1 week ago; 1 month ago; older than 6 months" when I was looking for a record that I knew was in March of 2018. It frustrated me enough to make me exclaim out loud an unabbreviated WTF!? A peek at the API calls it was making showed those options hardcoded directly into the "filter" parameter, so I couldn't just inject my own custom date range --- something which I have done before with success. I wrote a short script to scrape the (paginated, infinite-scrolling style) API and filter the tens of thousands of records myself, and almost half an hour later of waiting for those records to come back, found the one I was looking for. Doing that filtering on the backend DB would've probably been nearly trivial, and all the UI needed would be two date pickers (a long-solved problem), but because of that idiotic design choice, I wasted both their and my resources. Sometimes I feel a lot of modern software has authoritarian tendencies It's not just software, but you're right. I've referred to "modern design" trends as "authoritarian minimalism" too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30018763

raxxorrax 5y ago

I think it is wrong to optimize for such users since those are more likely to swallow anything anyway. But you also need to capture the more versed crowd, which will also be required to support the casual users. Have as much settings as you want, sensible defaults are important though.

Gigachad 5y ago

Settings are like lines of comments or the weight of an aeroplane. Less is better but sometimes it can’t be avoided. I just hate having to configure things though because I always lose my configuration when I change device or have to factory reset so I’d rather change my expectations to match the defaults than to configure something.

simion314 5y ago
Nobody forces you to change the defaults, if your IDE has a color scheme you don't like you can continue using it, change your own preferences then using a menu and a popup to select a different color scheme. The thing is some users want to change things and some developers are even capable to implement things without hard coding various constants. Most issues appears when designers (like GNOME ones) want to impose a brand or vision. Good apps will store configuration in a folder/file and they offer import/export functionality. As a person with eye sight problems I would be unable to do my job if a shit designer could force is shitty font sizes and colors on my apps(for some reason slim fonts with light gray on white background is sexy in recent years) TL:DR nobody forces you to open the settings panel, keep the defaults and don't try to demand or defend removing stuff you personally don't need, you don't understand how other work(use the applications)
- larsrc 5y ago
  All too often, especially in the open source world, settings are used as a way to not figure out how to make a good default. When the default is crap, I am forced to go to the settings and spend way too much time finding my way around a gazillion possibilities.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >All too often, especially in the open source world, settings are used as a way to not figure out how to make a good default. When the default is crap, I am forced to go to the settings and spend way too much time finding my way around a gazillion possibilities. IS there any evidence for this? Like what should be the default font or font size? Is there evidence that there is such a good default? The problem is you want that the good defaults match your preferences without proof that those defaults are good, Sure there are exceptions where evil or big ego people will force their preference over what the users want. Do you play video games? , if yes don't you think that sometimes you need to adjust the sound volume, font sizes, difficulty to match you? Do you listen to radio ? Isn't great you can adjust the volume or change the station? Do you use and IDE ? isn't great that you can change the color scheme, the code formatting scheme, the keyboard shortcuts, that you can install plugins to add more features to help you with your work? True story, I installed for my son an emulator and installed a game he wanted to play, after a few hours I ask about the game and he tells me that the controller buttons were weird/reversed but he got used to that. I then went in the menus and found the setting where he could have change those buttons so he do not have to suffer and rewire his muscle memory, the conclusion is we need to teach people to not be afraid to think "this software should work differently, let me check for a setting instead of torturing myself". P.S was not the emulator program fault, it could not have a default that worked for all game and controller combinations.

mostlysimilar 5y ago

You may be correct that "most people" don't love settings, but I think we underestimate how many power users there are in the wild. I personally prefer software to be customizable and give me a lot of options to configure and get what I want out of it. There are a lot of people who are willing to engage with your software and use their critical thinking skills in that process. I think we're losing something valuable by dumbing down all software and all interfaces to the lowest common denominator in the pursuit of "no friction" for users. Some friction is totally fine.

somehnguy 5y ago
It doesn’t even have to add friction. Optimize away for the common use case, that’s great and benefits the power user just as much. Just let people make changes if they really feel the need.
nerdponx 5y ago
I find it weird that people think settings are only for power users. Good defaults are very important for non-power-users. But if a non-power-user can Google their problem and change a setting to fix it, then that's a lot better than said user being left with no options at all.
- vkk8 5y ago
  By some definition, a person who does anything besides swearing when a piece of software doesn't work as expected is already a power user. I see this in many of my relatives. Googling the problem or checking the settings menu is something I do when asked to fix a technical problem in a piece of software I have never seen or used before and this more than they did before handing the problem to me.
supreme_berry 5y ago
xmprt 5y ago
I believe that the way forward isn't complex UIs or things like ribbons. Command palettes [1] solve most of the problems of discoverability while also helping power users by giving them quick access through shortcuts or highly configurable settings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373536

hwers 5y ago

I guess what's going on here, the reason people are divided, is that on software that you dislike (or are forced to use) people generally hate settings and just want the thing to work. On software that people love (like a piece of software that helps you make music or edit video) then people generally enjoy being able to customize it further and further.

yurishimo 5y ago
Exactly. Look at something like a video game. The customization in an MMO needs to be drastically different than pong. Settings are not a binary good/evil.
larsrc 5y ago
Nope. Two of my favourite pieces of software have very few settings because they remember what I do instead of forcing me to go and figure out a setting for it.
- funcDropShadow 5y ago
  Could you explain that? Software that tries to interpret what users are doing and then tries to adapt to itself is on a slippery slope. The first steps in that direction, like a history of visited sites, or recently edited files menu are uncontroversial. But when it moves menu entries around to optimize for assumed workflow of the user, that user gets infuriated very fast. Software that I cannot adapt to my needs is like an interactive tv. Ultimately I have no control over what is happening. Software that I can adapt to my needs puts the personal in Personal Computer.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Do you mean "like [non-] interactive TV"?
    - funcDropShadow 5y ago
      yes

User23 5y ago

I think this is also an interesting observation for physical objects too. I wouldn’t say I like to muck with the settings, but I’d consider it a critical design flaw if my desk chair didn’t let me. Same with my car’s seat, steering wheel, and so on. It does make one wonder though to what extent automating that customization optimally might be possible. It would be cool if every time a different driver sat in the car the mirrors, seat, wheel, and whatever else automatically adjusted for maximum comfort and safety.

asoneth 5y ago
I like your metaphor. A desk chair with no ability to customize is too constrained. One with dozens of dials and knobs is far too fiddly, at least for me. There is a happy medium with just the right amount of configuration for most people.
- simion314 5y ago
  But most of good apps have the Settings split in categories and advanced sections, you are not forced to see or touch them. It is not like in real world where many options would have to mean 100 buttons,switches and levers always existing there in your face.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I agree that it's easier to have more hidden options in software than in hardware, though my recollection from my IT days was that the "Advanced" section in the settings panel seems to attract the kind of people who have no business changing advanced settings. (Personally I like how Firefox hides them under "about:config" with a warning.) Having said that, hidden/advanced settings still have a nonzero cost.
    - simion314 5y ago
      Sure. there is a cost but iumagine a GNOME dev /designer getting his hands ona video game: 1 remove the difficulty level settings, we keep medium , like only a small percent use the Super hard so fuck the those customers 2 remove brightness sittings, the game is calibrated for the desgner expensive screen 3 remove settings for FOV, bloom,shitty effects, we force teh customer to endure our preferences, if they fill sick fuck them, they can refund 4 remove Controls settings, we see what most people use and we force everyone to use that, if someone does not like it they can use a third party hacking program to customize the cntrols. 5 Sound and Music volumte, remove them, the Speackers and headphones have buttons for this, the OS has buttons for this... ..... Sure settings cost but removing or not adding them is a "fuck you" to the customer, you can get away with it if you either are GNOME and your product is forced as default , or if you have no competitors that can provide a similar product with better defaults, options and features. Btw I am talking about real features and not how round your button corner is, at my work we had 1 customer requesting our app be able to process TRL(right to left) input and output, we probably had 10000 users but we implemented this feature for this 1 customer because we realized that we can do it and we could gain more customers if we have this feature. Now you have an extra button/checkbox for the RTL option in the GUI , the problem is not that this feature exist maybe the problem is the designer that is not competent ernough to make this RTL button fit nicely in the GUI.

Tagbert 5y ago

Having good defaults are a benefit and if done well most people don't need to fiddle with settings. For those who are not satisfied with the defaults you have chosen, having settings to customize things can defuse what would otherwise turn into frustration. Even if your defaults are 90% right for 90% of the people, they are likely to each have a different 10% that they are dissatisfied with.

dfxm12 5y ago

People love when software does what they need, and some of them will be willing to fiddle with settings if they have to. Settings can be well designed or poorly designed though. In a way, settings are really part of the design and should be thought of as such. If the settings are obvious to find and obvious in utility, it's not a matter of willingness to fiddle, it's just part of using the software.

nirvdrum 5y ago

I'm not a designer, but I have done a fair bit with HCI for whatever that's worth. I recently read "The Design of Everyday Things", which I understood to be a seminal text in the UX world. In it, Norman argues that no one-size-fits-all product actually fits all and leaving off 1% of the population is still a rather large number of people, so in the spirit of human-centered designed you should provide options or settings to support those people as well. I've been struggling to reconcile that with UX of many software products in the time since. The modern UX ethos seems to be that settings indicate a failing of the product and if people don't like the path laid out for them, they're either wrong or they can go use something else. I think the book also makes the argument that constantly breaking workflows isn't very user-friendly either, but SaaS products routinely change their UI and workflows around. I suppose I can see the business justification for that, but that doesn't necessarily make it good UX. Of course, Norman could just be wrong or my interpretation of his text could be wrong. Either way, something feels off to me with modern UX. I suppose if you've run actual user studies (not just A/B tests), then you have more contextual data than I do. But, I came away from reading the book really wishing more software products (both SaaS and the recent spat of "opinionated" frameworks/tools) followed the principles he championed.

bo1024 5y ago
It's simple. Most software today is not created to serve the user. It is created to accomplish certain goals (e.g. obtaining money, attention, data, or prestige from the user) and only serves the user as incidental to accomplish those goals.
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  I think that's probably true in the SaaS world. I'm seeing the same mentality take hold in the open source world with "opinionated" or "curated" software. Tools that have limited options or actively remove options and expect the developer to conform to them. I think it's being driven by this same notion of "options = bad" that we see in UX in general, but maybe they're coincidental, but unrelated phenomena.
  - 5y ago

phil-martin 5y ago

One persons settings are another persons feature. For example, my kids endlessly change the icons, colours, sound and many other visual and functional behaviour of their phones, the vast majority of which I would consider ‘settings’. But for them it’s highly important and fun The defaults are fine for me, but changing those settings isn’t a cost to them, it’s just plain fun. It’s easy to dismiss that as not real work, but I see the same in workplaces. Being able to customise your tools to be that little bit more bearable can sometimes be the difference between having a great day and crappy day at work. A little bit of control can feel very empowering.

supreme_berry 5y ago
ramoz 5y ago
This is exactly what I’ve seen with serious enterprise applications. Where users perform some complex task all day in the software. “User Preferences” are first order feature inclusions. They vary across global levels and down to specific feature settings. I’ve seen multiple occasions of customized layout/grid solutions. One random thing I’ve wondered is if Excel power users end up implementing a ton of preference customizations. Otherwise it seems like a very well equipped “default-only” UX.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
This was true with Windows 3.1. When I finally installed it I soon bought theme packs and delighted it making it into an expression of my interests. Accessibility was also much improved over DOS and even GEM and Geoworks. Moving to OS X was such a disappointment in comparison.

eitland 5y ago

> 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. Exactly. Don't think about settings as a failure. Use reasonable defaults and let users override them in a reasonable way.

dgb23 5y ago

Fully agreed. Imagine there were no mouse/controller sensitivity settings for example. These and many other settings can have huge impact on how usable something is.

overgard 5y ago

I'm not sure that's true. I usually am far more frustrated when something in an OS isn't customizable. One reason I prefer Linux and Windows over macOS is because macOS tends to be much more rigid in what I can customize.

lillecarl 5y ago

I mean it's an issue tracking system not an app for the masses.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> 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. Or a setting that once set doesn't stay set. If I arrange the settings for something, especially part of a UI, I do not expect those setting to go back to defaults every time an update happens. Somewhere between functionality and not having functionally is only maintaining functionality through constant user effort to rebuild settings. Like the rental car I had that constantly reset the heated steering wheel every time I got in. I don't want you to be on. I told you I do not want you on. So stop turning yourself on every time. THGTTG predicted this frustration decades ago (the Nutrimatic drink machine scene).

echelon 5y ago

> Most people don't love fiddling with settings. Passive consumers don't. Power users, domain experts, creators, engineers, and owners love settings.

peteradio 5y ago

Most people aren't engineers. Depending on the software you might have people begging for settings.

thawaya3113 5y ago

This does not track with anyone I have met in real life. People have no problem with settings as long as the settings are reasonably easy to understand and actually help solve the problems they have. In fact, Apple setup a store that did nothing but sold settings…the iPhone ringtone setting. Other countries have had mobile companies selling more settings. Wallpapers, hello tunes (messages that play when you call someone instead of a ringtone), etc. Settings are not inherently bad. Unnecessary settings and bad defaults are bad.

wtetzner 5y ago

That’s the thing. Not everyone wants the same thing. Provide useful settings, but try to pick the defaults such that most people won’t have to change settings.

bluedino 5y ago

That's actually a big part of the Android/iPhone debate

rapind 5y ago

Yes, I think it really depends on what the software does and what I'm using it for (my willingness to invest time). If it's something I use every day for years on end to make a living, then I probably want to be able to tweak and customize it (and I won't mind doing it). Just don't make me keep doing it because your evergreen software keeps updating and changing how things work. If it's something I "barely" use, then I have absolutely no interest in customizing it. It should just work. For example, if all I want to do is securely share a file with someone, then don't make me jump through hoops to use it. If however I was looking for software that let me share organized groups of files, should sort in a specific way, would expire after a certain amount of time, and to track engagement with these files (downloads / views), then are probably a few settings I will want to tweak. What I think often happens is software will evolve / pivot to do more (maybe sometimes less?) then it was originally designed to do. Unfortunately that evolution some times lacks a different design perspective. You might have been religious about clean and simple in the original product, but now it's a bit more nuanced, and you'll need to be more flexible. I don't think there's an easy solution. We just need to recognize that as features are added, design still needs to be part of that process.

idiocrat 5y ago

Good default settings and good auto-tuning functions are welcome. The cars are delivered with handbrakes on, wrapped in with wrapping paper/red ribbon. Some people do not realize they need to release the handbrakes and remove the wrapping paper. They are driving for years with default settings, wondering why the mileage is bad and it smells like burned brake pads.

bane 5y ago

I once inherited a software product that had an incredibly complicated data import process that non/semi-technical users were supposed to be able to use. The training for the product spent almost half a day on learning this process (before anything else in the software!) and it was often in the top-3 of user support issues. I set about analyzing the problem over a period of a week or so and documented my findings with some recommendations. It ultimately boiled down to far too many settings, most of which were footguns, and no sane defaults that served most users most of the time. In the end, I instructed the development team to make a number of changes which were mostly around picking defaults, or having the import process use some heuristics to make a reasonable guess, but letting users override them if the software did something wrong -- we modeled very heavily off of various MS-Office import processes, particularly MS-Access and MS-Excel. We ended up getting what was something like a 40+ step process down to 3 clicks that more or less eliminated the support tail and turned training into a 3-5 minute show and tell. One of the problems with lots of software IMHO is the lack of sane defaults, the blizzard of hard to grok options and settings, and the multitude of ways of doing nearly-exactly the same thing.

whateveracct 5y ago

Framing settings as pure cost is so wrongheaded. Sometimes, there's multiple viable ways to use a piece of software. That's settings. That's facts.

syshum 5y ago

Even worse is having been able to tweak the functional for DECADES only to have a random update remove those settings... Looking at you Microsoft

nspattak 5y ago

There is nothing wrong with configurable parameters. What users hate are fighting with settings. In my experience this involves two things: more technical people know what they want to configure but don't know "where the fuck in the settings it is" or less technical people who know what they want to do but do not know that it can be configured/where to do so.