Trust in Apathy

UX professionals generally accept without question the principle that users do not change their default settings. Unfortunately, I’m not the type to accept anything without question, a trait that is a constant nuisance to my colleagues, but one that generally leads me to a firmer understanding and greater confidence in a decision. So I dug into it, and found some interesting facts:

The notion that users do not change defaults holds: a study done by Jared Spool, patron saint of usability, gathered hundreds of config files from Microsoft Word users, and found that less than 5% of users had changed any of the settings at all. That is, more than 95% ran the program rigged exactly as it was when it was installed.

But in looking at his description of the experiment (which he posted to his corporate blog), the reason why users do that: users suggest that "Microsoft must know what they are doing," and they assume the program’s settings were based on careful consideration of their needs and rigged it the best way for the average users.

Looking further, this trust is entirely misplaced. Spool touched on some contacts at Microsoft to get more perspective, and what he found was that a programmer decided to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes (everything turned off). The firm did not make a conscious decision, or even give much consideration, to the needs of the user. They just never got around (a kindly way of saying “didn’t bother”) to do the research or, if they did, they never got around to telling the programmers what the default settings ought to be, so it shipped with all the extras turned off.

I’m a bit disappointed that this is where it ends, such that it can be written off as the result of one apathetic employee. I doubt that’s true, and would even go so far as to speculate that the programmer in question mentioned to someone that they needed to do some research to determine what those settings should be. He may have mentioned it to several people, several times, to the point that they got annoyed with him and someone gave the order to back off ... or else.

Perhaps that’s just me, projecting personal experience onto a situation at another firm, but it’s entirely plausible, especially given that Microsoft is infamous for being aggressive on deadlines and raining hell-fire on teams whose projects that fail to make their ship dates. This results in a shortcut culture in which “little details” such as doing research to determine the users needs are put on the sidebar (never to be taken off of it) or even purposefully scuttled. In such a culture, a bone-headed error like this isn’t merely possible, it’s probable to the point of being virtually guaranteed.

In the bigger picture, I expect that many technical products have this flaw – and I don’t think it’s limited only to technology. The manufacturers of even mundane products build in an array of options that they assume the user will configure to suit their needs. Meanwhile, the user assumes that the manufacturer considered their needs in the default configuration. The collision of these assumptions, like a comedy of errors, leads to rotten user experience.

The irony of the situation is that insiders know this very well. Spool’s research also contrasts the behavior of programmers and designers to those of the average person, finding that people who are involved in creating software know about the shortcomings of the default configurations. Per the research, programmers and designers “often” change up to 40% of the default settings of the applications they user, and “some” change as much as 80%.

So it’s not that the people who design and build the products are unaware the default settings are less than optimal, and I doubt it’s that they know but don’t tell. They know, they tell, and they are threatened into silence by someone who was looking to go faster or cut costs. As such, it's at the level of corporate culture that the problem needs to be solved.