Dave Winer tweeted a photo of a weird, verbose, and confusing Android options screen. I love Android, but like most open source projects, it falls victim to the proliferation of options, rather than making decisions for its users.

When explaining this to developers at conferences, I generally mention the preference panels in Adium, a Mac OS X chat client. It practically has an Advanced tab for the Advanced tab. Stuff everywhere. Problem is, when there are too many options, your users can’t find any of them.

Open source doesn’t need to be this bad. One of the tenets of the WordPress philosophy is Decisions, Not Options:

When making decisions these are the users we consider first. A great example of this consideration is software options. Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration. As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in. It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.

Buried in the annals of WordPress, a release philosophy document was heavily inspired by the writings of GNOME contributor Havoc Pennington. On preferences, he wrote (nearly 10 years ago) —

It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits – and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don’t understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar.

• Too many preferences means you can’t find any of them.
• Preferences really substantively damage QA and testing.
• Preferences make integration and good UI difficult.
• The point of a good program is to do something specific and do it well.
• Preferences keep people from fixing real bugs.
• Preferences can confuse many users.

I find that if you’re hard-core disciplined about having good defaults that Just Work instead of lazily adding preferences, that naturally leads the overall UI in the right direction. Issues come up via bugzilla or mailing lists or user testing, and you fix them in some way other than adding a preference, and this means you have to think about the right UI and the right way to fix problems. Basically, using preferences as a band-aid is the root of much UI evil.

WordPress is known for its simplicity and usability, but I can still think of a half-dozen options I wouldn’t hesitate to remove under the right circumstances. Many WordPress plugins subject their users to too many options. Don’t add settings screens simply because you know how.

Challenge yourself. Learn to decide.