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Choosing your next camera: Do users change their settings?
  • Back in the early days of PC computing, we were interested in how people used all those options, controls, and settings that software designers put into their applications. How much do users customize their applications?

    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.

    What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

    This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.

    Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

    We thought about that and wondered what the rationale was for keeping such an important feature turned off. We thought that maybe they were concerned about people running off floppies or those who had slow or small disks. Autosave does have performance implications, so maybe they were optimizing the behavior for the worst case, assuming that users who had the luxury to use the feature would turn it on.

    We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. We explained our hypothesis about optimizing for performance. They asked around and told us our hypothesis was incorrect.

    It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes. Making a file filled with zeroes is a quick little program, so that’s what he wrote, assuming that, at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him.

    Since zero in binary means off, the autosave setting, along with a lot of other settings, were automatically disabled. The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

    We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program.

    It seems programmers and designers like to customize their environment. Who would’ve guessed? Could that be why they chose their profession?

    (Big takeaway: If you’re a programmer or designer, then you’re not like most people. Just because you change your settings in apps you use doesn’t mean that your users will, unless they are also programmers and designers.)

    We’ve repeated this experiment in various forms over the years. We’ve found it to be consistently true: users rarely change their settings.

    Via: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/


    Read this and think why the cameras are designed a way they are designed today.
    So, next time you start asking for setting allowing to adjust gamma curve, remember, most users don't give a shit about it.
  • 6 Replies sorted by
  • Thats a very interesting study. I reckon that comparing users of creative and artistic software that the findings would probably be the same as for designers/programmers. There may be exceptions, such as Photoshop users may mostly run with the defaults, and that maybe true for NLE users/editors. But I reckon pretty much all Maya users alter the defaults (I mean, frankly, that auto-complete crap really needs to be turned off, its one of the first things you do post install), as would most Zbrush, Silo, Corel Painter, Mocha users etc. Likewise most Nuke users end up not only altering the defaults but end up building gizmos over their time using it.
  • Microsoft Word is without doubt the number one offender in the category of user abuse. One look at this behemoth's massively bloated and haphazardly organized settings nightmare is enough to account for Microsoft's findings that "Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all". The upredictable side-effects of altering MS Word's settings are so hazardous that most people learn to avoid doing anything that might screw up the formatting of their documents.

    I've used every version of this product since Word 97 and each has been more unmanageable than the last. The user interface of the latest version is an atrocity of self-indulgent header-bar encroachment, burying virtually every essential function under a pack-rat nest of gratuitous marketing fluff. They even hid the most basic UI element of all - the File Menu itself!
  • @LPowell
    You wrote many emotional words. :-)
    Research is not based on Word only, it is used as well known example.
    Being UX designer I can tell you what this is nearly universal rule.
    I won't comment on Ribbon bashing, as this is also something personal and do not have any real foundation. :-)
  • I had a coworker who refused to change her IDE settings which resulted in compiling errors. My boss forced me to fix it for her, and she began calling me a plumber.
  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev
    OK - here's an objective data point for you - MS Office 2010 has been effectively banned from my office workgroup. Most use Word 2007, some will not tolerate anything beyond Word 2003. All shared documents must be saved in Word 97 format. IT understands and supports this policy.
  • @LPowell
    It is not objective data point :-)
    It just tells us that your group is skilled and efficient with old versions :-)
    And it is absolutely ok.