If an app or web app does only one thing and does it intuitively and simply, then probably configuration could be skipped.
From the marketing perspective, configuration allows to personalize a product and that's a huge selling point for the customers.
I guess, to make an app very usable and minimal correctly, a lot of A/B testing needs to be done with lots of user groups, so that you could choose which features are really attractive and useful, and which of them distract people and make them leave your product.
I guess the no-configuration approach would work very well for the beginners, but the configuration would be preferred by power users.
Agree with the idea of skipping configuration for simple cases. Here I think the concept of "sensible defaults" is useful.
However, while personalisation is definitely a powerful capability and selling point for customers. I would say that it should be raised to a product-level feature, accessible by the user directly through the UI, rather than buried inside a machine-parsed configuration file.
A full UI with suitable controls and navigation is much more user friendly than a verbose configuration file requiring additional training to master. This would strike a balance between usability and flexibility.
One of the basic principles of usability is that users shouldn't have to read an additional manual or documentation in order to use the system, if possible. It's interesting how often the field of usability intersects with software design.
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If an app or web app does only one thing and does it intuitively and simply, then probably configuration could be skipped.
From the marketing perspective, configuration allows to personalize a product and that's a huge selling point for the customers.
I guess, to make an app very usable and minimal correctly, a lot of A/B testing needs to be done with lots of user groups, so that you could choose which features are really attractive and useful, and which of them distract people and make them leave your product.
I guess the no-configuration approach would work very well for the beginners, but the configuration would be preferred by power users.
Thanks for your comment, @djangotricks.
Agree with the idea of skipping configuration for simple cases. Here I think the concept of "sensible defaults" is useful.
However, while personalisation is definitely a powerful capability and selling point for customers. I would say that it should be raised to a product-level feature, accessible by the user directly through the UI, rather than buried inside a machine-parsed configuration file.
A full UI with suitable controls and navigation is much more user friendly than a verbose configuration file requiring additional training to master. This would strike a balance between usability and flexibility.
One of the basic principles of usability is that users shouldn't have to read an additional manual or documentation in order to use the system, if possible. It's interesting how often the field of usability intersects with software design.