Electrical Switches and the power of Defaults

Ever noticed a peculiar property of an electrical switch! It is always made like this:

Always when you click ON, the circuit gets completed and the electricity flows. Imagine if it was the other way round i.e. when you put the switch to off position, it inserts an insulator in the circuit and the circuit breaks. In that case, if a switch gets old, imagine switching off and then also the fan keeps running.

So, why did the electrical designers choose the first design over the second one. I think they did because of two reasons:

1. Most of the times, any electrical appliance is in the off state and the circuit is broken, so it makes sense to do this.
2. It is much safer and cheaper to implement. Imagine, how would you implement inserting an insulator and think of different approaches to do that, to get the meaning of this.

Although, the second reason would have been the driving force in the case of switch designers rather than the first. But, software engineers often do not get the same luxury. They do not have the second reason to help them decide their defaults because coding wise, often the two options take the same time. So, a software engineer must always keep in mind, what option will be in use most of the time.

Default options are always there to take care of the 80-20 rule. 80% of the users of your product will want a certain functionality more often, you need to know what they need the most and make it available as a default or as near to the user as possible.

A case in point: Office 2007. It does not add any new functionalities over Office 2003; but it changes its default options very beautifully. It makes all the often used options available and displayed in a ribbon, instead of hiding them in multiple menus. Another great idea has been to change the defaults according to the action you are doing. So for instance, when you are writing, you are on Home tab, when you have selected a picture, you are on picture tools in Word 2007.

Another case in point: The difference between Nokia N70 and Nokia 6500. The most striking difference to an end user are the default options. It's a pain to navigate into multiple menus to get to one of the oft-used options in N70, while a newer model understands this pain of the user and makes the most default options available at a single click. The defaults are one of the reasons why Sony Ericcson phones made a huge market in India. They did it because they provided dedicated keys for music, Bluetooth and camera options. I do not mean to take the credit away from their superior camera and music quality, but just another factor contributing to their popularity.

So, the point is, how do I, as a software developer decide, where to keep my default options. Most of the times, the cost or the effort will be the same for implementing any of the options as default ones. The answer is: you do it the hard way. You do it by understanding the needs of your user, you do it by dogfooding your own code zillions of times, and be aware of where you can make it better.

Identify, the oft-used features and make them the defaults.