What you're saying is the orthodoxy among designers.
The author of this article is saying they disagree with that orthodoxy.
I don't think it's helpful to just repeat the orthodoxy without saying more.
In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.
Is it? I see an awful lot of overwhelming pointless 'settings' crammed into weird corners all over the place, sometimes in ways where the default experience is just broken and long-term users just all learn they need to tick the appropriate settings to have an acceptable experience. Over time the settings proliferate and the settings page just becomes a dumping ground. Maybe designers (or project managers) need to take this 'design orthodoxy' more seriously.
The author’s own screenshots show a settings page with like 15+ separate pages of miscellaneous settings. Maybe there’s no other way to solve the design challenges in his app, but I doubt it. When he claims that “users love settings [...] just look at your own user behaviour,” he’s projecting his personal preference/compulsion for testing and analyzing trivial tweaks (maybe as a way to procrastinate from actually using the tool? or because thinking about tool design is more interesting to him than tool use?) onto other people.
E.g. when he suggests “Some details become annoying because they are so repetitive” the easy answer is: just cut those out! Why should users have to hunt around obscure corners of your tool for a way to eliminate the annoying gimmicks you added?
Note that it is entirely possible to have a very flexible, powerful set of tools that satisfy a wide variety of niche needs while having those tools available to all users in a sensible way, without any need to hunt through the "settings" page to access them. It just takes a lot of design effort to figure out how to break down user goals into parts, abstract them, make tools capable of handling those, and then teach users how to use them.
But trying to solve tool design problems without the crutch of adding extra checkboxes to your settings page doesn’t mean you have to cripple the software or prevent people from using it in their own way.
Trust me. I have gone through every settings page on iOS, WP, Samsung, Android and many more.
All of them were necessary. You would be surprised at how many non engineering people using android samsung have non designer approved fonts and themes.
> In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.
Reading carefully, I don't think OP made this claim exactly. I suspect all three of us might agree that there are good reasons to add settings and that we should be careful of adding them for bad reasons.
I think in many cases a setting gets added not because an individual /refused/ to make a decision but rather because no individual was /empowered/ to make the decision. I find it easy to imagine a meeting (perhaps a meeting with too many participants) that gets deadlocked on some question and the only apparent way to get out before lunch is to compromise on making it a setting. And maybe compromising the design is the best way to go, but then that's how it will be.
The author of this article is saying they disagree with that orthodoxy.
I don't think it's helpful to just repeat the orthodoxy without saying more.
In particular I'd be very happy never to see the claim "people only add settings because they're shirking their job of making a decision" again. I don't think it's true, and I think it's impolite to make such a claim without justification.