One of the biggest annoyances I have personally with settings is with this split of settings for the post feed and the post screen.
We have four setting screens for them:
Post list
Comment list
Post appearance
Post and comment appearance
In my opinion this is really confusing and also causes some organization problems. In reality there are only two screens served by these 4 setting pages. We have the Post Feed which is the main screen of the app; where a list of post is presented. And the post screen which displays the main post and then comments for that post.
The main reason why this was split into 4 setting screens is because the appearance setting screens show a preview of the UI and so I wanted all settings on these screens to change something UI related that can be immediately seen in the preview. I thought this would be a cool way to show changes. My feelings here hasn’t changed.
The issue is that organization of the settings is confusing.
As an example, let’s say I was a user who wanted to see if I could change the image of the posts to appear on the right side of the screen in the list layout for the post feed. Reading the settings, my eyes would immediately jump to the Post list settings page. This page states it has settings pertaining to the post list which sounds like it show hold the setting I’m looking for but it doesn’t. Instead this setting is actually in Post appearance.
So my current idea is to reduce these four setting pages into two pages:
Posts feed.
Post & comments.
Then featured prominently at the top of these two settings screen will be a button that will open their respective appearance customizations.