Last night I joined the Baltimore PHP Meetup for a presentation on WordPress 3.0 from Andrew Nacin, one of WordPress’ core developers. It was an excellent presentation and Andrew covered a lot of interesting material, but the part I kept thinking about today was his section on WordPress’ release philosophy – specifically that there is indeed a cost associated with implementing configurable user preferences in user interface design.
The following is pulled from the WordPress Codex and illustrates some of those costs:
- 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.
The ability to personalize an interface often adds tremendous value and I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. However, if you adopt an attitude of the more user preferences the better without considering the point at which you’re achieving diminishing returns, you’re not only on the wrong track – you’ve simply stopped making decisions.
It seems to me that if you want to make money, you’ve got to make decisions. If you’re trying to appeal to everyone, you’re going to end up appealing to no one. That’s true whether you’re talking about websites or life in general.
