In UI design, when debates about how how a feature should behave reach a stalemate, someone will typically suggest adding a preference as a compromise. “We can’t know, so let’s let the user’s decide!” they say.
Giving the user the choice may sound like a user-centered solution, but it’s the opposite. It’s a team dynamic-centered solution — a cop out from our responsibilities to deeply understand the user’s scenarios and their relative weights.
The success of a new preference depends on a chain of contingencies:
- The user has to stop and think at a meta level about what they are trying to achieve and how the product is failing to help them. (Usually people blame themselves rather than the product.)
- It has to occur to the user that an option that will help may exist.
- The user has to risk wasting time by stopping productive work and searching for an option.
- The user has to be able to wade through the available options to find the right one.
- The user has to experiment with the option to make sure it solved the problem
Typically, the user will not search for the option, but will simply satisfice with the default behavior. Therefore, the real winner of the UI debate is whoever got to define the default behavior.
This New York Times article provides some evidence of the power of the default:
In the United States as well as many European countries, when people renew their driver’s license, they also decide whether they want to be organ donors. As a 2003 study in the journal Science found, more than 90 percent of Europeans are organ donors, while only about 25 percent of Americans are — even though most Americans approve of organ donation. In the United States, to be an organ donor you have to sign a form. The reverse is true in Europe, where you are an organ donor unless you expressly indicate that you don’t want to be.
Another study, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that when employers switch procedures for voluntary 401(k) contributions from “opt in” (you sign a form to take part) to “opt out” (you sign a form not to), rates of participation go up by as much as 30 percentage points.
Preference panels with countless arcane options indicate an absence of UI clarity and leadership
That new option, dug deep down in preferences may seem innocuous. But the more options pile up, the more weight is added and the harder it is for users to find the truly important options. This is the core argument for a bias towards minimalism in UI design. This UI cruft accumulates over time, and it’s hard to take it back. As Steve Jobs has said, “We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.” Designers must fight tooth-and-nail to prevent the cumulative effect of these expedient decisions.
