There’s a temptation in product design to treat flexibility as a virtue.
Give users options. Let them configure everything. Don’t make assumptions — let people decide for themselves how they want to work.
It sounds respectful. It’s actually exhausting.
The paradox of choice in software
Every configuration option is a decision you’re offloading to the user. Every setting that exists is a setting someone has to find, understand, and make a call on. And then remember they made that call six months later when something behaves unexpectedly.
The apps with the most settings panels are often the ones people complain about the most. Not because they have too few features — but because using them requires maintaining a mental model of their own configuration.
Opinionated design isn’t arrogant
When we say AKARI builds opinionated products, we don’t mean we think we know better than our customers about what they need.
We mean we’ve thought hard about the right defaults. We mean we’ve made calls so that you don’t have to make them on day one. We mean the experience should just feel right — not because we got lucky, but because we spent the time figuring out the sensible path.
You can always find edge cases where the opinion is wrong for a specific person. But the answer to that isn’t to add a settings toggle. The answer is to get the opinion right for as many people as possible.
What this looks like in practice
Fewer screens. Fewer menus. Fewer places where you have to decide something before you can do the thing you actually wanted to do.
The question we ask: if you have to read documentation to understand a core workflow, we haven’t done our job. If you find yourself hunting for a setting, we’ve shipped something we need to revisit.
Simple on the surface doesn’t mean simple underneath. It means we did the hard work so you don’t have to.