We spend crazy amounts of time creating personas and charting down user flows. We nail the product to its core and define different usage patterns and provide solutions to the various complexities involved. Often times we know that the one’s who use our products have different preferences, and so we go ahead and give users the ability to configure the product to their usage. This article will give you some guidelines in creating a good settings/preferences for your product.
Not everything is a setting!
Story of the photo from Flickr
This is the clothes washer at the Airbnb apartment we’re staying in Prague. I could not understand the settings for the first load and it ended up washing our socks and underwear for, I kid you not, 3 hours.
The no. of choices and inputs are just too many in the above, the user had to tinker around to find the correct way to wash.
Difficult product decisions should never become a setting. For example: If there’s a debate in your team which is building an email client, whether to show four lines of summary or two lines of summary for each email. Do not make it a setting!
