Title: Designing Settings
Context: All software has user settings. For some reason.
Synopsis: We live in a personalized, customized, bespoke world designed, developed, and made specifically for you. You want a firmer mattress than your sleeping partner? Turn a dial. Like your coffee just a little sweeter than everyone else? Tell your personal barista. Set your car interior to adjust to your body’s dimensions. Have your news only report on the topics you find interesting. It’s your world, and only you live in it. Of course this ubiquitous level of individual specificity come at a price: you need to tell someone—or more likely; something!—exactly how you want your particular experience delivered. In other words, you need to adjust the product or service’s user settings to reflect your distinct preference. This of course takes time and can involve a high degree of interaction complexity that gets buried on the front end only to be exposed under the hood where the knobs, buttons, and dials used to tweak each experiential micro-component live; a shell-game of “Hide the Confusion”. But even here, in the back room chaos of user settings controls, it is possible to deliver a better, clearer, more intuitive means of managing one’s personal preferences once we stop treating it as a junk drawer for all the UI we removed from everywhere else and attend to it with the same sensibility we lavish on the rest of the product.
Best Bit: “Difficult product decisions should never become a setting.”
via medium.com
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