On Defaults

The most important product decisions are the ones the user never makes.

Every default you set is a choice you’re making on behalf of thousands (or millions) of people. Most of them will never change it. Not because they agree with your choice, but because changing defaults requires knowing the option exists, understanding the tradeoffs, and caring enough to act.

This makes defaults an enormous responsibility. When you set a notification to “on” by default, you’re not offering a feature — you’re opting everyone in and hoping they’ll opt out if they don’t like it. The asymmetry is staggering.

The best product teams I’ve worked with treat defaults as seriously as they treat the features themselves. What should the first screen show? What should happen when the user does nothing? What’s the zero-state experience?

Getting defaults right is hard because it requires you to genuinely understand your users — not the power users who will customize everything, but the vast majority who will use your product exactly as you shipped it.

David Allen’s GTD framework has a relevant idea: your mind is for processing, not storage. Similarly, your product should make good decisions so your users don’t have to. Every decision you push to the user is a tax on their attention. The best products pay that tax for them.