Interfaces should have opinions

There’s a tendency in product design to optimize for flexibility — give users every option, let them configure their experience, stay out of the way. The reasoning is intuitive: different users want different things, so who are we to decide?

But this view confuses flexibility with quality. Infinite configurability is often a failure to make good decisions on the user’s behalf.

The best interfaces have a point of view. They make strong defaults and expose only the choices that genuinely matter. Opinionated design isn’t about removing user agency — it’s about using the designer’s judgment to reduce cognitive overhead for everyone.

Think about the tools you use most fluently. Rarely are they the most configurable ones. They’re the ones where the defaults are so good that you rarely need to change anything.

The question for every design decision shouldn’t be “how do we support all possible preferences?” but “what’s the right answer here, and how confident are we?” Strong opinions, loosely held. Make the call, watch how people use it, update as needed.

This doesn’t mean ignoring diversity of need. It means being honest about what you actually know versus what you’re deferring because you’re afraid to choose.