Yes, it's an exercise for the developer to know their audience and their affinity for settings.
As a user of software, I agree with the author: I am generally happier with software that is highly configurable to my preferences versus software that is rigid and limited to the tastes of the developer.
Of course, this is a continuum; I am not so obsessed with configurability that I build my own customized OS from source. But a healthy settings/options/preferences panel is a way to earn my interest as a user.
> How about this rewrite: Some users love settings.
Yup.
I'm definitely one of those users. Sure, most of the time, the defaults are great. But there are probably so many things some software can do that people don't know because they never even bothered to poke through the settings.
If a piece of software has a slightly annoying behavior of some sort, the first thing I do is go to the Settings to see if it's optional. When I get a new phone, the first thing I do is check out what settings it offers. I'll even enable Developer mode (Mainly for the feature to show a circle on where I touch the screen).
Really? If your software is only used by a very specific kind of person in very specific circumstances, that logic might work. Otherwise, you'll always find two different people, or one person at two different times, with mutually contradictory definitions of annoying behavior.
For example, what should the default volume setting be? (Warning before you answer: if you don't pick the volume I want right now, it'll be annoying!) Okay, what should the default mouse speed be? (Just so you know, I might be 20y.o. with a gaming mouse or 80y.o. with a trackball.) Etc.
Right now, it's generally hard to always know what the default volume should be and I consider that a failure. One day tech will be sufficiently advanced that it can adapt to the environment and user and consistently pick an excellent default volume.
We're improving though. Volume settings are an unnecessary annoyance in a great deal of apps already and you won't need to tweak it in many apps that pick good standard defaults for notification sounds, mic volume, etc. It's grating when apps pick bad default volumes and it immediately assaults our ears. Unfortunately, users sometimes still have to tweak a global/system volume setting, but hey, things aren't perfect and it's good to have a fallback when software fails.
Two people may indeed have different preferences, but that's no excuse to force users to configure a bunch of knobs and switches themselves. Good design adapts to the user. When it doesn't, then settings cleans up after the failure.
>One day tech will be sufficiently advanced that it can adapt to the environment and user and consistently pick an excellent default volume.
This is sadly true, but I really wish it wasn't. There's no way to automatically determine the correct volume without privacy violating brain scanning.
my experience is that users love personalization, but not necessarily "settings". if they have to change a setting to get the functionality they need out of your app, they're going to be frustrated. even if that functionality is one-off weird stuff that makes no sense to be enabled by default.
as long as the app does what they want out of the box, they love unnecessary stuff like setting a custom background image or theme color.
Yes, it's an exercise for the developer to know their audience and their affinity for settings.
As a user of software, I agree with the author: I am generally happier with software that is highly configurable to my preferences versus software that is rigid and limited to the tastes of the developer.
Of course, this is a continuum; I am not so obsessed with configurability that I build my own customized OS from source. But a healthy settings/options/preferences panel is a way to earn my interest as a user.