Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Why Preferences Are Bad

Preferences make your product unnecessarily complex in various ways.

First, since people will look in your product’s settings area for things that they need to be able to change, every needless choice you offer makes it harder for them to find what they’re looking for. Every preference they have to look through makes the one they actually need a little bit harder to find, and the search a little bit more frustrating.

Second, preferences make your product inconsistent by introducing modes; each preference is a mode (see Chapter 23, ​ Modes ​). If you ever sit down at the computer of a user who likes to play around with the operating system’s preferences, you’ll quickly discover that you’re constantly annoyed by things that ...