People can self sabotage by choosing a bad theme, and then they engage with the app less or even churn. Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.
No, they don't. It's my system, and the look should be what I want it to be, period. What designers actually need to do is learn to respect their users, even when they disagree with the user's choices.
My teenager has their cell phone keyboard configured so all the symbols are replaced with cartoon cats. They can't type properly on it at all - I get text messages that are completely garbled - but they love that they can do this even though it actively impairs their functionality.
Some people like having ridiculously long fake nails that make it difficult to do their jobs (i'm thinking some checkout clerks I've seen who can't properly push any of the keys on their terminal), but it's their choice.
Certainly that's a good reason to force a legible version of settings, and the path to settings...
But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font
The issue with this thinking is that it's easier for people to quit using the product than to figure out how to fix the font. You can't beat the simplicity of doing nothing, so you need to avoid getting into this state in the first place.
Gotta keep users engaged in your app, right? Keep them onboard even if that means removing all their choices. I mean, should we even allow users to uninstall apps?
After all, the developer always knows best and all users are helpless children who need to be forced to conform and comply. Who cares what the user thinks or wants so long as we keep that sweet, sweet engagement.
If your users are not engaging with your app, you can't deliver user value to them. If you are unable to provide value to their lives because they happened to accidently changed a font that is an unfortunate circumstance where the user is losing out on value they could have had.
It's not that users are helpless, but that they just don't want to spend their time dealing with stuff they don't want to. Users like it when things "just work."
There is nothing wrong with providing sensible defaults and a good collection of pre-designed profiles to choose from (and yes, even a big, friendly RESET button).
But that doesn't explain taking away options. Users who don't want their time with this stuff would probably not use the customization options in the first place.
Also, the term "deliver value" has been badly tainted after too many companies have used it as an euphemism for "extracting value".
It's the same non-logic that advertisers use: Ads are both a service for the viewer, informing them of amazing opportunities, but also somehow the viewers must be forced into consuming that service.
I'm deeply skeptical of situations where people have to be forced into something "for their own good".
Targeting users who enjoy debugging and troubleshooting software is not the way to develop high quality software. You shouldn't be purposefully adding bugs or corrupting installations just to give people problems to figure out.
Nobody said anything about "purposefully adding bugs or corrupting installations".
What you're advocating is protecting the user from themselves, which is antithetic to the entire ethos of the hacker.
Yes, you as a developer shouldn't fuck up the user's setup. But if the user fucks it up on their own? Then that's on them. Don't limit the power users because you want to infantilize the casual users.
> and then they engage with the app less or even churn
I wasn't aware engagement maximisation is the reason we don't get customization options anymore, but it makes perfect sense.
No one used to care about this because it was at the discretion of the user whether they want to keep using the app or not. Whereas today, it's the company objective to keep the user in the app as much as possible.
I remember the miniform of media players. Because while you need the full interface while managing playlists, you only need a few button and some status when you’re playing music. I don’t think Spotify will ever implement that feature.
That’s clearly bullshit because
if the user sets a system wide theme and your appLICATION follows that theme, then your appLICATION is not going to be any harder to use than the system itself nor any other appLICATION using native widgets.
What is actually happening is designers are forcing non-native controls, in part because web technologies have infested every corner of software development these days. Unsurprisingly, those non-native widgets break in a plethora of ways when the system diverges even marginally from the OS defaults.
And instead of those designers admitting that they fucked up, they instead double down on their contempt for their users.
Also, can we please not call desktop applications “apps” in response to an article about an OS that predates smartphones by several decades.
The colors is part of the content of the product. And it's not that it is 100% more likely for someone to leave sooner, but that it increases the probability that people leave sooner.
This sounds much like a post hoc justification for having not bothered to go to the effort to implement the ability to allow anyone (power users or otherwise) the freedom to customize the "app" to their liking.
