Following up on my recent I just want a Hamburger post, I came across a wonderful article by Jared Spool entitled Do users change their settings?.

In line with that I said about developers thoughtfully making decisions on options for their users, Jared makes some beautiful points

Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all.

Why?

They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

Is this true?

The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

It should be the case. As I wrote

It is our duty as developers to make the best choices for our users, to select the most useful defaults and to offer only the most necessary options.