5.2.1 Blooper 46: Overwhelming users with decisions and detail

Many GUI programs overwhelm users with controls, function, options, and settings. However, what overwhelms users is more subtle than just the sheer number. An application having fewer controls and settings can be harder to learn and use than one having more controls if the controls in the first application are out of place, haphazardly designed, or poorly organized.

There are several common variations of this blooper, each corresponding to a different way of screwing up the selection, design, and organization of an application's controls and settings. Of course, some software products are screwed up in more than one of the following ways.

Variation A: Choices users don't need or care about. Some software products provide choices and settings that users don't need or want. If a software program contains many settings that are foreign to the target task domain, it doesn't matter whether the program has 100 settings or only 20; users will perceive it as difficult to learn and tedious to use.

For example, suppose a genealogy program included a setting for specifying the number of memory bytes the program reserves for information about each person in the family tree. What do people who are compiling family genealogies care or know about software memory allocation? Answer: Not much! Although this example may seem far-fetched, there are many software applications in...