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[Alex King]

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/sep1998/nf80929b.htm

1. Eliminate options. Often, engineers and designers can't agree on the 
best way to perform a task. When this happens, their first tendency is 
to make it an option, allowing both methods. An example of this is the 
"overstrike" and "insert" modes for entering text from a keyboard. How 
many times have users accidentally hit the "Insert" key and not have a 
clue why text starts disappearing as they type! An abundance of 
preferences and options makes great feature lists on packages, but 
these "features" are confusing to users and rarely used. Good design is 
like good editing, eliminate the extraneous, leave only the essential. 
It is difficult to do.

--Alex

http://www.alexking.org/


On Oct 14, 2004, at 10:12 PM, Matthew Mullenweg wrote:

> Kimmo Suominen wrote:
>> I think it would be safer to have it default to unchecked.  But how 
>> about
>> making the default an option?  This way everyone can have it their 
>> way.
>
> Because options are evil and we should have as few as humanly 
> possible. :)