I only wish it applied to more places. E.g. it searches help files, but they're basically always worthless, and it doesn't search non-menu things (settings, in-window toolbars, etc). Intellij has a nice cmd-shift-A which does most of this ("search everywhere" iirc), and I use it absolutely endlessly.

Which is a problem, because the vast majority of StackOverflow-like Q&As are in English and mention the necessary setting in English, of course.

And you cannot rely on your translational abilities, because many of the translations in Windows are stilted.

It's part of the standard, default menus on almost literally everything. There are ways to hide it if you're determined to be an asshole app (Cisco AnyConnect does this for instance, though there are so few menu items that it's not too horrible), but it's exceedingly rare because you have to explicitly remove it to have that happen. Far, far below 1%, it's mostly just awful corpware.

[1] https://www.raycast.com/

Maybe people don't need to see questions asked when Tomcat 8.mumble was new now that we're on 10.something.

> If you can do the right thing automatically

I think a lot of software will shoot for doing the right thing automatically when they don't actually know what the right thing is. Or they'll remove the options because they think that the users don't want settings at all. But users do often want all of the behaviors (even the contradictory behaviors) that settings enable -- they just also want those settings to be discoverable and intuitive, and ideally they don't want to think about what they're set to most of the time.

As an analogy, as a user I like automatic high beams in my car if they work well. And having an automatic mode that's turned on by default might mean that I don't need to spend as much time messing with my high-beam brightness, and that's great. In a world where they worked perfectly, I might never even need to learn how to adjust the beam brightness myself. But I still want the behavior of different beam brightness in different contexts.

There's a trap designers fall into sometimes where they say, "settings are too hard for users, therefore the headlights should only have one brightness." If a bunch of users are asking you about something, that means they're engaged with and care about the functionality they're asking about. It might of course indicate that different defaults should be set, or that UI should be reorganized. And if you can do the right thing automatically, then you might be able to get rid of a lot of those support calls by doing that instead. But make sure you actually can first, because users are signaling with those support calls that they do care about that feature/behavior.

Really, the list of hidden features on products is such that nobody has solved discovery. Affordances that work are ones that mimic already learned behaviors. But shared learning is not as universal as folks think it is.

Interactive systems that let you ask "what will this do?" Or "why did that happen?" Are very good. But even that is hard to work with sometimes. Consider how few folks use the apropos utility.

Haha, I'd think only people who were never in a car as a child wouldn't know that. An adult might not mess with them enough to suss out that behavior, but kids loooove playing with seat belts.

My brother-in-law is large enough that when he pulls his seatbelt out far enough to actually go around him, it locks, and he absolutely hates it.

Is there a reason this "feature" even exists?

Edit: Gah! As a Dad myself I am compelled to add that his lack of experience with carseats is clearly aparent to me.

https://csftl.org/whats-the-deal-with-weight-limits/

Personally, I don't think that was a good threshold to set. I agree that the LATCH anchors are better. In 2003, I suppose people were mostly using carseats for infants and toddlers in little 10-pound styrofoam shells, now we know kids are safer in carseats until they're significantly older and heavier, and they're in 25-pound adjustable, heavily bolstered bucket seat style carseats.

how many users is this in proportion of the silent majority which has no trouble finding what they want in the menus ? you can't base a judgment on complaints alone

Nor can you assume that the users who are are NOT complaining are happy. They may just be enduring the crappiness until they can jump to something that's better.

"Discoverability" is perhaps not exactly the right word here.

Just because something is "there" (SOMEWHERE) doesn't mean it's discoverable. The users might have completely different vocabulary to describe features that are are present but which have an unexpected name. Or they might have a workflow in mind that doesn't give a name to what they need, but which is nonetheless there.

I think this is hard problem.

With any "complex-enough" tools, one just needs guidance or straight-up training. Fusion-360 comes to mind. It's a very popular and rather nice CAD tool that has enormous, wide-ranging capabilities. Autodesk has a never-ending stream of training videos and courses dedicating to showing users how to do things with it. Without these, its just too difficult for people to "discover" how to use the thing.

Some people want to take the effort to become proficient with their tools, others are doomed to wish they had features that are right in front of them.

But being less powerful, efficient, and adaptable to keep the design clean and simple and make everything discoverable should be an anti-pattern for serious apps and tools.

I wonder to what extent command palettes are the solution. At least for me, they are the pinnacle of discoverability. Throw the list of all settings and actions into an easily discoverable command palette and let the user search for them by filtering the list. Make it fuzzy enough to account for different formulations of the problem. VSCode does it (mostly) right.

A hard to find setting is better than not having the feature to begin with. The main prblen with "modern" UIs is that they are strait up removing feature and acting like its a good thing.

I know it's partially off-topic... but Instagram removing the ability to view content without and account and pretending they did it for the benefit of the users is pure BS and it gets even worse when you consider how agressive they are at requesting your phone number.

Any modern application that has more than 20 settings should have a good search function in its settings menu. That way you can have as many configurable options as you like without them being impossible to find. The defaults should ofc be the most common (or best) ones, but some users really do value customizability and respecting the users is (almost) always a good idea.

If the software doesn't do something they want, most users will either use it as-is but be somewhat annoyed, or develop a (possibly manual) workaround. Most will not explore settings or read instructions, so spending a lot of time on "discoverability" is probably time better spent elsewhere.