Making settings pages better
Settings for software products are cumbersome most of the times for me. Turning notifications, emails on/off, saving preferences are some of the things you can do on them.
It would be super helpful if the settings would be set based on the signals sent by the user.
For example, if I kill the iTunes app that pops up on my macbook *every* time, with in 5 seconds of it opening, when I connect my phone to it, I probably don’t want it to start up iTunes. But, I am too lazy to find a way to turn it off. And even if I do, they might add some other app later that I will need to turn off.
Instead if after observing me kill the app for X times, it doesn’t open up (X+1)th time onwards, that would be awesome.
“But, what if I don’t want settings to change magically?”
There could be two ways to potentially deal with this,
- Have popups show up when you predict changing the setting for the user. Something like, “We noticed you are doing X always. Do you want to turn it OFF? The only thing I don’t like about this approach is the fact that there would be a popup.
- Have one master setting to turn this “settings magic” ON and OFF. This is actually feasible with some user education around it.
Would you use the settings magic instead of manually setting every preference?
