364: How to Design Better Settings

This week, we deep dive into tips and strategies for building a better settings experience in your product. In The Sidebar, we discuss the efficacy of paginating onboarding screens.Golden Ratio Patrons:Float Float has been a lifeline for teams working remotely in 2020. It lets you keep track of who's working on what and plan your team's time, from anywhere! Float gives you an accurate view of your team's availability and capacity., allowing you to set custom work days and hours and schedule a status to let your team know where you're working from. Learn more at float.com/designdetails.Hover Hover has over 300 domain name extensions to choose from when building your brand online. No matter what area of the creative space you are in, there’s a domain name waiting for it - from .DESIGN, .ART to .INK, .PHOTO and so much more. Get 10% off your first purchase when you sign up at hover.com/designdetails.Sponsors:This week we're supported by Webflow! Webflow gives designers the power of code in a visual interface, allowing them to directly build whatever they have in mind without engineers.Webflow is perfect for prototyping and user testing. It allows you to embed interactive details like hover animations, responsive layout changes, and anything else that the real product might have.Webflow lets you create standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JS with familiar, visual tools. Because of this, you can give your developers something more than static mocks: start building fully responsive, interactive websites. You can even use real data and structured content, providing for more accurate user research sessions and more realistic flows.When you’re done prototyping, Webflow writes clean, production-ready code for you. Hand it off to a developer for implementation — or just publish straight to your custom domain.Learn more at http://wfl.io/designdetails for 10% off annual plans on any new account. Latest VIP Patrons:Walter KimaroRayBizarreThe Sidebar:The Sidebar is an exclusive weekly segment for our Patreon supporters. You can subscribe starting at $1 per month for access to full episodes going forward! Sign up at https://patreon.com/designdetails.In this week's Sidebar, we talk about the efficacy of paginated onboarding screens, and suggest alternative onboarding patterns that we've learned about through experience.Follow up:Brian is testing Marshall's work journaling strategy. One week in, so far so good! Marshall also put together a sample outline for anyone curious about seeing how this might work in practice.Main Topic:This week's listener question comes from Priscilla Then, who asks: What's the difference between "Settings", "Configuration", and "System" (would it be appropriate to have all 3)?How should "Settings" be used?Should Settings be displayed visually "apart" from the rest of the first-level navigation options, like how Shopify does it (putting all things in the left sidebar from the top, but the settings at the bottom)?What do you think of companies that have multiple, tiered settings (like Zoom)? Do you think that they executed it well?Cool Things:Brian shared Poolside.fm, a magical website that now has an accompanying iOS app. You should download it right now and experience it in all its beauty.Marshall re-shared Copilot, a fantastic app that will change the way you use money. The team has been making a ton of improvements in the past few months, including better recurring transactions support, rules-based transaction categorization, budget rollover, and new account types.Use Marshall's code B7NG7A when you're signing up for some bonuses all around!Design Details on the Web:📻 We are @designdetailsfm🎙 Brian is @brian_lovin🎙 Marshall is @marshallbock📬 Don't have Twitter? Email us at [email protected]🙌 Support us on Patreon - your support literally makes this show possible. Thank you ❤️❓ Got a question? Ask it on our Listener Questions Hub, and we'll do our best to answer it on the show :)⭐️ Enjoying the show? Leave us a review on iTunesGoodbye!