Problem summary

The user needs a central place to indicate preferences for how the application should behave.

Solution

Let users indicate their preferences for how your product should behave. Provide a central place for users to customize your product to their specifications. Keep configurable options well-organized, predictable, and manageable in number. Group and move less important settings to their own screens.

Provide an overview

Let the user be able to quickly understand all available settings and their current values. If there are many settings to comprehend, prioritize the ones most likely to interest users. Group and move less important settings to seperate screens.

Good Defaults

Consider good initial values for preferences – choose the default most users would choose and be neutral and pose little risk.

When to group

To avoid in-comprehensive lists of preferences, consider clustering settings into multiple shorter lists. Good heuristics are (you might change numbers):

• 7 or fewer preferences: Don’t group at all.
• 9 to 16: Group related settings under two or more section dividers.
• 16 or more: Consider constructing subscreens, but keep a consistent terminology in mind: make sure titles of subscreens match the label of the setting which opens it.