Do users change their settings?
Jared Spool:
We embarked on a little experiment. We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.
We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.
Turns out pretty much only programmers and designers change settings. Granted the study was based on Microsoft Word. But it’s still very interesting and worth keeping in mind.
It also showed that most people trusted Microsoft to choose good default settings — Which they hadn’t.
The takeaway: If you’re going to add settings, don’t add too many. And make the defaults as good as possible.
