julian/blog

Havoc Pennington wrote an excellent article in which one of many things he very properly critized was the overuse of preferences. Now, I know that the Microsoft Office for Windows team has gone way over the deep end when it comes to preferences, but Office v.X for Mac was pretty decent. It had a lot of preferences (many of which were pointless), but nowhere near as many as the Windows version. It seems that for Office 2004 they couldn’t contain themselves:

Honestly, how many users will really really need to modify those? I could see maybe having one preference: “Fade when inactive for 10 seconds.” If the user is happy with that, they leave it on. If not, they turn it off. There’s no need to allow users to set the fade percentage, the minimization effect (!), and the exact time before it fades. Heck, I can’t even tell what the setting is right now. Let’s see, I’ll count… there are 6 hash marks there.. minimum at zero.. maximum at 60.. ah, ok, so it must be in increments of 10. I shouldn’t have to count lines and then divide in my head to figure out a setting.

This really feels to me like a case of the UI designer saying “hrm, I can’t figure out how exactly to add this feature in a way that pleases most users, so I’ll just let the users set it up themselves.” Using an application should not be a game of creating your own UI. I understand there are many, many different users of Office, but that’s no excuse for something like this. This is just an inability to make a decision.

The other preferences in Office 2004 have been similarly beefed up. It’s rather depressing.

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