Defaults
The default is what a preference is set to for somebody who has never touched it — which is most people.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Configuration:
- Custom User Preferences — preferences and their defaults
Almost nobody changes a default
Consistently, across every kind of software. The proportion who open a preferences screen at all is small, and most of those change one thing.
So the default is not a fallback — it is the setting for the overwhelming majority of your users, and it deserves the attention you would give a design decision rather than a configuration value.
Choose for the common case
Not for the power user, not for yourself. The person you are designing the default for is somebody who will never see the preference screen and does not know the option exists.
Default to the safer option
Where a preference has any privacy or disclosure dimension, default to the more conservative setting and let people opt into the other. Somebody who never made a choice should not be treated as having consented to the more exposing one.
Watch what people change
The most useful signal you have. If a meaningful proportion change the same preference to the same value, your default is wrong — change it, and their explicit choice is preserved anyway.
Nobody will report a bad default, because it does not look like a fault. They will just work around it or accept it.
Changing a default afterwards
The subtlety worth understanding: it affects people who never chose, and it should not disturb people who did.
If changing a default overwrites an explicit choice, you have overridden a decision somebody made deliberately — which is worse than a poor default, because they will notice and will not know why it changed back.
Tell people if it is visible
A default that changes how the application looks or behaves will be noticed. A brief note prevents support calls from people who think something is broken.
Do not use defaults to force behaviour
If everybody should have a setting, do not make it a preference defaulted to your preference — set it. A preference implies a genuine choice, and using it as a soft mandate is dishonest and produces a setting people flip back.
Worked example
An organisation reviews preference usage after six months. Rows per page had been defaulted to 20; 40% of users had changed it to 50. The default became 50, leaving explicit choices untouched, and complaints about paging stopped.
Recommendations
- Treat the default as the design decision.
- Default to the conservative option where privacy is involved.
- Review what people change — nobody reports a bad default.
- Never overwrite an explicit choice.