Jared Spool had conducted an analysis on users' settings of Microsoft Word and found out an interesting results:
- 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."- 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.
The results above remind me of the observations I made during usability testings in the past: usually users might be classified into 2 groups: advanced users & home users. For advanced users, they are more likely to set up those 3C products on their own or for their family members at their places, when they start using a new product, they might act like followings:
- Most of them spend some time going through the settings to see what they can do with the options.
- If they don't know what the setting's for, usually they won't change it.
- Once they are done with the first-time-setup, they seldom go back to the settings unless they encounter some difficulties and couldn't figure out how to solve it.
As for those home users, they even do no changes to the settings because most of the time they only use the product. Furthermore, due to the lack of background knowledge, they might be afraid of messing up the product, especially for those elderly, inexperienced 3C product users. Therefore, when you design your application, of course users should be allowed to customize their application to feel more flexible, but don't expect anyone to change the settings unless your target users are professionals.
To me, the following result means a lot than previous two ones:
Since users don't equip enough knowledge to know those professional technical jargon, not only designers should provide explanations or set the default options with better ones since users trust designers so much and we shouldn't fail to live up their expectations.
- The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.
