The quiet power of good defaults
A note on designing systems that help people make fewer decisions.
Every setting you expose is a question you are asking the person using your software. Most of the time they do not want to answer it.
The cost of a choice
A configuration option looks free. It is not. It costs the reader attention at the moment they encounter it, and it costs you a combinatorial explosion of states you now have to support forever.
The good version of this is boring: pick the option that is right for almost everybody, make it the default, and let the rare case override it.
// Not this
render(content, { theme, spacing, density, width, hyphenate });
// This
render(content); // sensible everywhere
render(content, { width: "narrow" }); // when you actually mean itWhat makes a default good
A good default is not merely a popular choice. It is the choice that fails most gently when it is wrong. If someone never touches the setting, they should still land somewhere reasonable — and when they do reach for the knob, it should be because they have a real reason, not because the software refused to decide.