Perhaps ironically given the subject matter, I found this 34-minute video by Razbuten a bit intense, but I would still recommend it to people who work on onboarding, settings, etc.:

In the video, the author tries to answer the question: how to make any given game a challenge, given there is no universal standard of difficulty and every player arrives at a game not just with different skillset, but also likely different goals.

There are many techniques a game can use to adapt to the player – a simple upfront difficulty selector, complex difficulty settings, a training level, adaptive difficulty, accessibility/​assist modes – but there are no easy answers. Each method comes with pros and cons, and perhaps the very notion that a game should adapt to the user is flawed; some players might find it more rewarding to have to step up to the game instead.

In the video, Razbuten covers a lot of examples really well. I’m not going to say any of this maps 1:1 to productivity software as goals of games are very different than goals of apps… but even though I have never played any of the games mentioned, the examples made me think. After all, some of the psychology of mastery will be the same between these two realms. (I bet there were at least some of you who saw the previous post about LaTeX and thought “this looks hard and fascinating – I’m going in,” and others took a note to never approach it.)

I recently installed a screenshotting utility CleanShot, and I was enamored with its settings:

There’s much to like here – thoughtful grouping and layout, good explanations, more details than expected.

There are some nice interaction moments, for example the hints swapping to reflect the current status:

The fact that the tool allows you to override its single-key shortcuts, which are the hardest to change using third-party keyboard customization apps:

Or, when you want to customize the key visualization, Settings shows a nice preview:

There was even this lil molly guard:

But also just the settings themselves gave me a sort of competence contact high. A few clicks in, and I thought “oh, they do know what they’re talking about.” So many things here were for me, to solve specific problems I encountered.

It all gave me confidence this is the right tool for the job. (Also, perhaps a corollary: has there even been a bad tool with well-designed settings?)

Compare with also-new-to-me settings from Affinity, which I was much less impressed with:

It uses the troubled right-aligned style originating in iOS, the capitalization is clumsy, and the navigation muddy (it feels like in-page links on the web, which are always confusing).

Is this a fair comparison? Not at all. I don’t actually want to say that CleanShot is better and Affinity is worse. This is so very much east coast apples and west coast oranges.

I don’t even want to say settings are always worth designing well in the traditional sense; sometimes the only thing between you and 20 unnecessary options in your app is simply having no surface that could host them. A limited (but never unpleasant!) settings UI might be an intentional design decision.

But there was a nice quote in the Shadow of the Colossus book: “I often find myself exploring simply because it’s beautiful.” I too became a tourist in all of CleanShot’s settings because they were put together so well, and I was so curious what’s behind the next corner. Its creators understood that the best way to get to know what the tool is capable of is to take a stroll through the settings. I think it’s a good case study at how a proper welcome mat doesn’t always have to be a few onboarding tooltips flying spastically around the screen. Sometimes it won’t look like a welcome mat at all.

This from a blog post by my friend Glenn Fleishman about audio/​video settings in macOS just made me laugh:

It’s doubly funny if you are aware of Fleishman’s extensive experience in printing.

Also, this:

I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.