It’s Not About The Settings

I remember the first time I used Windows properly: there were lots of settings. Pages and pages of settings. Entire magazines made a profit from explaining how people could, and should (and should not) use the settings to do, well, anything. Want to read your email only on Tuesdays in March? There’s a setting for that.

There is, I think, something called the poverty of choice: when you can do anything, it’s hard to do something. For a long, long time personal computing used choice as a benchmark: the more options you were given, the better a piece of software or hardware was. This led, inevitably, to companies Dell and their confusing array of PC options.

Choice is good for experts. I want to decide which album to listen to this evening; I am an expert on my music collection. But I don’t want to do the detailed research to work out what album to buy next: that’s what iTunes reviews are for. The vast invisible mass of iTunes reviewers does my thinking for me.

Most people are not experts. Most people have too much choice. Most people, myself included, want to be guided when they’re on unfamiliar ground. And this is where the personal computing industry failed until recently: it assumed that normal people like my mum wanted a level of choice which (with respect to my mum) they really couldn’t — and didn’t want to, didn’t need to — handle.

Some people complain that iPhones and iPads are too locked down, not open to customisation. Yes: that’s the point. They offer the smallest set of choices necessary to help us achieve more with less thought, less effort. Isn’t that what technology is all about?