Missed this one back in September but John Saddington, developer of the ever-popular Desk app for OS X echoes the WordPress philosophy of making smart design decisions to avoid the frustration a user may exhibit when dealing with software with a lot of options:
So, when I began thinking about building a native desktop application I thought long and hard about the decisions I wanted the user to make instead of navigating through a ton of options.
John (and WordPress) are right. His product, Desk, eschews much of this philosophy and he goes on to reference other writing platforms such as Medium, Svbtle, Roon and Ghost which were clearly design influences. Too often when we develop new platforms or products, we focus on creating too much functionality. Our desire to think of everything the user may want in a piece of software often results in creating the exact opposite of what we intended.
The original WordPress quote is also a winner:
Every time you give a user an option, you are asking them to make a decision. When a user doesn’t care or understand the option this ultimately leads to frustration.
As developers we sometimes feel that providing options for everything is a good thing, you can never have too many choices, right? Ultimately these choices end up being technical ones, choices that the average end user has no interest in.
It’s our duty as developers to make smart design decisions and avoid putting the weight of technical choices on our end users.
This philosophy is often difficult to follow if you're working in big enterprise. Feature creep is often a result of demands from superiors who are more concerned about satisfying some internal motivation than focusing on the experience the product will have on their users.
The screenshot of the Microsoft Word window is another reason you should read John's article. I've seen that very interface on numerous client systems.