Imagine if your software was a physical device; how many switches, buttons, and information displays would it have? What colour would it be, how would you hold it?
I subscribe to the idea of opinionated software, the notion that software developers should make decisions rather than adding end-user options.
Observed in operating systems
Mac OS allows you to change global appearance settings: the “Appearance”, which can be “Blue”, or “Graphite”; where the scroll buttons appear, either “together”, or “at top and bottom”; and the highlight colour when you select text, which can be one of around ten options.
Windows will let you change almost anything from font-size in windows’ title bars, to making buttons be purple italic Comic Sans on a teal background. The settings are vast, and it’s rare to see two Windows machines that look alike once a user has found the settings.
Linux takes options to the extreme. Users not only have a glut of options, a skilled user could edit the operating system’s source code, so not only can the whole thing appear differently, it can act differently.
Customisation vs. time
Simple is better than complex.
I’m not advocating a single, homogeneous interface to all computers: we all require different things from “the computer”, what I’m suggesting is that there should be fewer options. Fewer things to change. Interfaces should be simple, and intuitive.
The message is two-fold:
- The more switches there are, the more time is spent switching them.
- Make fewer switches.