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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Options are a cop out. It’s the designer’s job to figure out the best way to use the product, and delegating that choice to the user is pure laziness."

Yes. Open source does not get this at all.

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No. Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design and I hate it. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that if there's a choice between doing something two different ways, rather than adding an option, the developer should pick the solution that fits 90% of their target audience and ignore the remaining 10%. The problem with that is that every time you make that decision, you ignore a different 10%, and eventually your software is only suitable for users who stay inside the box that the developers made for them, not the long tail of users with niche use cases. I think open source devs don't "get" this because they tend to write software to scratch their own itches and they often have their own niche use cases. Maybe the reason they had to scratch their own itch in the first place was because other software was too inflexible to fit their needs.

Of course, some open source projects do have this philosophy, and when they start removing options, I switch to something else. GNOME is a good example. I wish the current version of Nautilus (GNOME Files?) had half the options of the file managers that forked from earlier versions of Nautilus (Nemo and Caja,) because I actually use those options.

This.

How useful would hammers be if they ONLY drove nails?

> Removing options seems to be a common trend in modern software design

Here's a Slack example of this. We moved from HipChat to Slack and two of the "options" we as a team dearly miss are:

1. Being able to set a status that reflects what we're doing if unable to chat for the time being, not just a binary online or away. Now I have to inform the team I'm on a conf call or will "brb - making lunch" in a chat room which distracts everyone. HipChat was pretty flexible that way, it's a small thing, but for our team hugely important, especially for remote workers.

2. Being able to specify how long I'm AFK before setting me to "Away". Sometimes I take calls on my mobile (we have apps for our internal SIP/asterisk stuff) and I like to wander around when chatting because it stretches my legs. But I find annoying that on longer calls Slack assumes after 30 mins of no activity I'm "Away" and "grey blobs" me making it look like I'm completely offline. Unfortunately the "Snooze notifications" don't cut it because it still doesn't let me convey, at-a-glance, why I'm deferring your messages.

From googling around it seems these are common gripes that Slack don't see as a priority to fix.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things Slack does well, but as paying customers, not addressing these two issues causes some low level resentment.

If the designer's opinions don't match mine, it's a wonderful cue that I'm not going to be well-served by the software. Usually it annoys me that an option is missing, but maybe I should start interpreting it with gratitude. After all, the designer is saving me the time of trying to fight against them.

"Make the easy things easy, and the hard things possible." - Larry Wall

Don't make the easy things hard. Make the usual case the default, without any action needed by the user. But it won't always be what the user wants, so give them the option.

It depends on what the option is. If there is no right answer, if it comes down to personal preference, and if not having it the "right way" will frustrate a user, then by all means, make it an option. On the other hand, if there is a right answer, if that answer depends on circumstances known to the product, and if getting that answer wrong will cause the package to misbehave somewhere down the line, then it shouldn't be an option.

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