I know you’ve probably heard this before, but it bears repeating: set the default options for your application how most users will want them. Do not expect your users to go into the options and tweak them. They won’t do it. And don’t think that normal users won’t care, but advanced users will go in there and change them. They probably won’t either. Just think of all the applications you use and think of how many times you’ve tweaked the options. I know I very rarely do. Just a couple in Firefox, one or two in Visual Studio. That may speak to how well their default options are, how I simply didn’t know that I could change that option or how I just don’t know where to look. In the sea of tabs, combo boxes, and check boxes, how are most users (let alone most users’ mothers) supposed to know where to look to make cookies work or change the default formatting when replying to emails or keep iTunes on top of all windows?

I experienced this first hand tonight. My brother-in-law recently bought a new Toshiba laptop, all nice and lightweight and filled with memory that’ll never get used. Since he bought it last week he hasn’t been able to login to various sites including eBay, his bank and some other sites. Interesting isn’t it? A new computer shouldn’t have any problems like that. So we went over to their house tonight and I take a look. We open it up, I bring up eBay and the homepage shows fine. “Wait til I login” he says. Name, password, submit…

Sounds simple enough, right? I need to mess with the cookie settings. Ok, cookies, cookies… where were those again?

Lucky for me, I know that the privacy tab configures how the browser handles cookies, but my brother-in-law didn’t. He’s a pretty average user: definitely not as ignorant as my grandma, but he’s no developer either. He very well might have known where to look, but in this case he didn’t. He’s never needed to before.

Would you have known? Have you ever customized your privacy options? I always tell myself I should, but I never have. What’s there works and I’ve never had any problems… famous last words, huh? His computer for whatever reason came with all cookies being blocked by default. Sure it’s more secure, but it’s by no means usable and would never be fully usable by him until he got it reconfigured.

So why did it come so locked down? Did the OEM fall into the trap of thinking that users always customize their apps? I don’t know. But you should know better than to think this. As Jeff Atwood said:

For most users, the default value is the only value.

So always install your applications thinking that the options will never be touched again… because they probably won’t.