Google Chrome’s Options dialog box has perplexed some more traveled in the art of UI design with its unusual tab titles. Here’s a brief explanation of why we ended up going with this arrangement:
A core value for us was to keep the number of options low. Obviously some options are necessary - your home page, your network settings, etc. Some things represent genuine user preferences and others represent configuration that might be specific to a given installation. What we didn’t want to do was add a lot of choices that represented unresolved design decisions for the UI. This felt a little too much like “giving up” our responsibilities on the UI design team and making users to do our job.
At the end of the day, we ended up with a relatively small number of options. A simple sort of options into related categories proved problematic - the relationship between many of the choices was ambiguous. Some belonged in multiple categories. We quickly realized we’d end up with a lot of tabs that only had a few items in them.
So we went back and tried to think about what people would really want to get out of this UI. Mostly, people would be interested in changing their home page and other basic settings like that. Sometimes, people might like to change the default download folder or turn off password saving or something like that. Even less often, there might be a need to tweak proxy settings and make other lower level changes. So we did a sort by “most likely to be changed”, and that’s how we ended up with the grouping we have.
There are probably further improvements that could be made to our options dialog box, if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to remove a few more checkboxes. After working for several years on various sorts of options in numerous versions of Netscape and Firefox options dialog boxes though and watching the organizations that made sense at the time they were implemented become awkward when new features arrived, I’m not personally convinced any particular theme-based grouping scales well to the wide array of possible future modifications.
