If you’re going to give the user an option to change a default setting, make sure the setting is the default across the board. If you don’t, you are only going to end up frustrating your users.
An example of this occurs with Microsoft’s Office 2007 (at least in their Home and Student Edition, though I can’t imagine it being any different with any other). In this version, Microsoft updated the document formats to a new XML-derived specification. As a company well known for their efforts in backwards compatibility, in order to keep users not yet willing or able to adopt the new Office document formats satisfied the Office team decided to allow users to specify which document format should be used by default. By and large it works great.
However, this change of format doesn’t seem to effect the shell extensions installed, which allow a user to right click in a folder and create a new document. Those files are still created using the new format file. As it happens, this is my preferred method of creating documents as most often I find it more convenient than loading the application and navigating through the dialogue. My only problem is that it insists that it creates the documents in the new formats.
It might seem a small oversight (if it is indeed an oversight), but its one that regularly trips me up and that does hurt my experience with the application.
[tags]User Experience, Microsoft, Office 2007[/tags]
