one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.
When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.
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Non-techies are not going to learn the groupings for OS settings any easier than they'll figure out a UX pattern that's been widely accepted for decades: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
Of course, who don't know anything about UX tend to assume personal anecdotes map to a much larger sample size than they actually do.
I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.
I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.
The original settings app had a nondescript "General" label for this same setting: neither tells me to expect a default browser setting.
Overall the old UI was just the current UI with lower information density.
> Search is always available while the app is open, across all menus and functions.
> Therefore no placement or layout can be singled out as better or worse in the Settings app. All possible hierarchies or arrangements are equal.
> I unroll my Apple UX Researcher Toolkit (contents: blindfold, dart, dartboard, crack pipe), and use it to make my decision: I put the dropdown 3 levels deep under Touch ID, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be criticized, because we've also included a search bar.
It's just bad thinking. Sorry if you're upset I've called it out.
How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?
And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?
So yeah, please keep categories that make sense.