Delightful by default

I've recently noticed that I hardly ever tinker with the settings of the apps I use. Usually, I just go with how they come "out of the box". This observation is quite important to me because I work on creating internet apps for a living and have been a part of the app development discussions. This adds a fundamental north star to my thought process, which I aim to follow during those development discussions: Are the users going to have a delightful experience by default?

In the world of app development, we often end up adding lots of choices for users to customize their experience. We spend a lot of time creating these options, hoping that users will dig into them and make the app suit their needs. But what I've come to realize is that as developers, designers, or product managers, we might be better off using that time to make sure that the initial experience with the app is really great.

Interestingly, users usually start customizing settings, themes, or other stuff only after they've been using the app for a while. And that usually happens because they had a great experience with the app right from the start. Some good examples of apps that I think are delightful by default, while giving you a ton of customization, are Slack, YouTube, and Discord.