> He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.
Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs
Back in the 90s, you had a setting for everything! It was glorious. This trend of deliberately not making things configurable is the worst, and we can’t seem to escape it because artists are in charge of the UI rather than human interaction professionals.
App designers need to understand that their opinions on how the app should look and work are just that: opinions. Opinions they should keep to themselves.
It does make quality assurance an absolute nightmare, I would know, our application is like this to the 10th degree. Config on top of config on top of setting on top of options.
But if you also want your product to be productive for a way array of use cases, it's necessary. You need to think about your market.
Which is why you should think about how these options interact and compose at the start, as opposed to only adding options in an ad-hoc manner (whether you do it willy-nilly or only when your arm is really twisted)
"You mean we shouldn't use 10 layers of abstraction and 274 libraries to achieve our goal ? I mean, we use a lot of resuources, but look how polished the UI is: everything is flat. "
Thank god the RAM prices have risen. Maybe some people will start to programm with their heads instead of their (AI) IDE.
I rarely need to configure something on my PCs, but rarely is not never, and when I do really need an option, it better be there. There's a gradient between unmaintainable multidimensional matrices of options and "one size ought to fit everyone" and both ends of it make the user miserable.
I think when it comes to config too people really underestimate its power.
On desktop, I often see people waste inordinate amounts of time on workflows that don't suit their use case. Little do they know - there's a config for that!
For example, I'll see people holding outlook like it's radioactive. They'll do the same busy-body work of manually pruning their inbox and sorting stuff and deleting stuff. The config can really help them there, but I think they either don't know it's capabilities or are scared of it.
Most people also don't care about the mothers of programmers. Until, you know, they have to send an SMS using exactly (particular) one of the 2 SIMs present in the phone and the 20 years old app will not let them.
Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs