What makes a good options/settings dialog box?

Question

I was browsing the Worst UI You’ve Ever Used question, when I realized that many of them involved the options dialog of some application. This is obviously an area where a developer could get "lost" easily, since there are often a large number of options available which can be hard to organize. (Especially to the stereotypical programmer)

So since I'm getting ready to design an options dialog for my own application, I was wondering: what makes a good options dialog?

Tabs? A hierarchical treeview like Visual Studio that sort of acts like tabs? (I'm currently leaning toward this)

What do you think?

Answer 1

Make the most common options easy to find, and the advanced options "optional" to even look at... Hiding the options 99% of your users won't care about is very effective.

The main issue is not overwhelming the audience. Options dialogs tend to be crazy, just because people put every option available in there.

Having a good, clean logical grouping of options, with common options easy, and "advanced" sections making the obscure options less noticable is usually more important than a specific layout.

Answer 2

I think this really depends on how many options you will have, what their logical groupings can be, and where they can come from (the application, external plugins, etc.) The tree-style dialog used by Visual Studio is a good choice because of the large number of options and the many plugins/packages which provide options that are manipulated in this dialog.

The common patterns that I've seen are:

1. The Visual Studio type dialog (tree view).
2. The Word/Office options dialog (particularly in Office 2007/2010).
3. A standard tabbed dialog (only a good options with a small number (less than 4) of tabs).
4. A single dialog with options grouped using group boxes (standard .NET style or Office style). This is only viable with a small number of options.

Answer 3

Not having an options dialog is best.

If you do however have a lot of options, making it searchable is really helpful.