Looking back ten years on opinionated software
The idea of opinionated software is nowhere near new. And to an extent it has been rolled into our collective subconsciousness as a golden rule of how to do software UX design. Having said that, it’s getting to be over 10 years ago when the concept was first launched by 37Signals in their brilliant book Getting Real. I haven’t read Getting Real recently, but I did take a quick look and found that opinionated software is first introduced in Chapter 4.
I loved this idea when I first read it. I had just come off stints of writing software for telecom companies and payments companies, and part of the process of writing good enterprise software in the early 2000s was endless configurability. We put it together with extensibility and sold it. “What we’ve built is endlessly configurable and extensible. There’s nothing that it can’t do.” But wow was it ever boring. It was so boring that the world basically staged a revolt and caught hold of the opinionated software idea and ran with it.
And from that day forward I can almost view my product career as one long argument against meaningless configuration. Every new client, every new app, every new project I’m looking for ways to do more and code less. The question “what would a user expect” is basically the first question I ask when looking at a UI or thinking through a business problem.
So now that I’m sitting here 10 years on still incorporating the same theme into my design mentality, I have to share with you 2 examples of opinionated software that I saw recently that inspired me to write this quick post.
Example 1: the pumpkin light
We bought some pumpkin LEDs to put in our pumpkins for Halloween. They have a feature that’s absolutely genius. From the time you turn them on, they stay on for 6 hours, then they turn themselves off for 18 hours. Then the cycle repeats itself. So you carve your pumpkins, put them out when it gets dark, turn them on, and you’re done. No going outside in the cold at midnight to turn off the pumpkins. The pumpkin isn’t software, but what a wonderful example of “opinionated product design”. It’s absolutely brilliant. Don’t give your users 100 knobs to turn and configure. Give them what they need right out of the box.
Example 2: the federal small business registration site
If you happen to have a business interested in doing contract work for the federal government, you may have registered your business at sam.gov. And you’d rather go to the dentist and get 5 cavities filled than have to do that again. But during this process you may have noticed the least opinionated software ever created. When I saw this gem I quite literally fell out of my chair and couldn’t get up for 3 days from laughing so hard. Here it is:
So, you can choose which side of your screen you want the mandatory fields to appear on while you fill out a form. If anyone knows the designer that designed this, I would love to learn more about the process that lead to this. Please consider this my public call to locate that designer!
