As time passes, we’ve added more and more settings in Monica. This is against what I believe in and something I’ve tried to avoid for many years: do not pollute your software with an endless number of settings and personalization options.
A product should be opinionated and follow its own vision, at the risk of pushing back potential users. Why would people sign up for your product if it doesn’t have an unique voice or ways of doing things? My vision includes a simple, powerful product with the least amount of settings possible.
How on earth then have we added a Personalization tab under Settings?
I intend to allow personalization for things that I can’t control or decide myself. Monica is not a business tool. It’s supposed to mimic real lives of people and adapt to the unique situation of everyone. One of the mistakes I made early on was about genders for instance: I only allowed at first two genders, male and female. This was my own reality - but it wasn’t the reality of many, many people out there. Instead of deciding for my users, we’ve added the flexibility to define your own genders, that match your reality, not ours. I intend to do that for every concept that represent important aspects of our lives.
Note that settings won't include to personalize the number of elements to display on a page or any insignificant details like that. They just don't matter.
I hope that this clarifies a little bit where we are going with the personalization of the product in general.
