For years, just about every update of consumer cloud applications would include new features that the user could configure around their personal taste, convenience, and preferred uses. Over time, and with increasing features and capabilities, what had begun as an application’s simple settings, was replaced by a proliferation of tabs, cascading drop-down menus, banners, breadcrumbs, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and more, creating a world of choices and individual styles. With the flexibility to tailor the applications, no two instances looked or worked in quite the same way. It was a pattern of burgeoning options that we experience today in business-critical SaaS applications, although often on a much grander scale.
In principle, having flexibility is appealing. In practice, it can be daunting. Many of the choices require in-depth knowledge of the features and detailed investigation to understand its impact fully. The challenge becomes exponentially more complicated as you manage an increasing number of applications, each bristling with its own set of options and configurations. In all too many cases, the tendency has been to accept the default settings and move on.