Settings & Preferences

They try Notifications, which is about the ones inside the product. They try Account. Eventually they use the unsubscribe link in the email itself, which turns off more than they wanted. The product has lost a channel because a screen was hard to read.

Jared Spool collected several hundred Microsoft Word settings files in 2011 and counted the changes. Fewer than 5% of people had altered any of the 150 or so settings, and more than 95% were running exactly what the installer left.

That number is the whole subject. The defaults are the product for almost everybody, and a settings screen serves the few who arrive with a specific complaint. A team that cannot decide something tends to add a setting instead of deciding it.

Anatomy of a Settings Screen

A settings screen is a list of rows, and almost everything that goes wrong with one is in a part nobody named.

The Parts

Six, and the last two are usually absent.

The container, which is a page, a panel or a modal. The groups, each with a heading. The row, holding a label, a control and often a description. The control, which is a switch, a select, a field or a link onward. A search, once the list is long. And a destructive zone, where the irreversible things live, which is article 6.

The Row Is the Unit

Three pieces make a row and one of them is optional in the wrong way.

The label names the setting. The control carries its state. The description says what changing it does, and it is dropped whenever space is tight, which is exactly when it was needed. Toggle Buttons owns the switch itself, including the row as the target and the four states it can be in.

Three Scopes

The part almost nobody labels, and the source of the most confusing complaints.

An account setting follows the person everywhere. A workspace or organization setting is set by somebody else and may not be theirs to change. A device setting applies only here, which is why notification preferences behave differently on a laptop and a phone. Somebody changing something on one device and finding it unchanged on another has met an unlabeled scope, and the fix is a word rather than a mechanism.

What a Setting Costs to Exist

Every row is permanent in a way features are not.

It has to be built, kept working in both states, tested in combination with the others, translated, and supported forever. Two settings make four combinations and ten make over a thousand, which is why a screen grows more expensive than it looks. Hidden vs Disabled covers what to do with a control somebody cannot use, and the question this module asks first is whether the setting should exist at all.

Pro tip: Take your settings screen and write the scope beside every row: account, workspace, or this device. The ones you cannot answer quickly are the ones your support team is already explaining.