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 20, 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 ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access