and then there's the mswindows strategy of never redesigning settings pages, but designing entirely new settings pages that sort-of integrate with the old ones
...but only expose some of the settings, forcing users to go digging through the archeological pit that are older settings interfaces, because windows somehow things the settings they themselves added previously are pointless.
Then, ideally, spend a decade or more to partially and inconsistently replace just a few settings but not all, because somehow that makes sense, and at least that way users are encouraged to each go on their own little archeological dig?
Best of all, the new settings look prettier, but aren't always anymore usable, so it's not even really an upgrade.
Also some things are inherently complex. And there might not be good way to make them simple or pretty... I mostly find need to mess with network stuff on Windows and either way isn't exactly great...
But some of it is just poor UX - like one thing I repeatedly come across in both win10 and win11 iterations of settings is the really poor scrolling UX. First of all, the scrollbar is quite thin and easy to miss entirely. That also makes it hard to click on; which may not be the normal way of scrolling, but is sometimes handy - and settings need to be accessible for all kinds of people. Furthermore, the new larger and prettier padding between UI elements inside the scollpane makes is more common for the last on-screen element to have enough lower padding to make the page look visually complete, even though you're missing half (win11 isn't quite as bad as win10 here, but both are clear regressions vs. older versions).
But worst of all on the scrolling front is the auto-hiding behavior for the scrollbar. That's is just plain user-hostile. The number of times I've had to help non-techies find settings over the phone, vidchat, or even in person just to discover that the person hadn't noticed the small black scrollbar in the second or so it remains visible on screen, and they just couldn't find the setting they needed even after explanation because it had not occurred to them to even try scrolling. What inane designer thought it was a good idea to needless animate something in the first place, and then additionally to hide critical UX for anyone that merely looks at the screen without interacting with it for just 2 seconds or so? A clear, sad case of form over function.
And that's just the scrolling; the incompleteness is a big issue to (though I'm not yet sure how bad win11 is on this front, so let's hope it's at least improved).
Also, at least in win10 there's the inconsistency between settings that are immediately applied, and those that require you to apply them. Most apply immediately, which sort of makes sense, but that makes the rare apply button (which also visually is not really an eyecatcher) easy to miss, and there's no warning when you exit without applying. So far I get the feeling this is better in win11, but I haven't tried actively looking for problem cases yet.
All in all: very much meh, and I'd rather they made settings obvious, and made it easy to review what you've changed, and which settings differ from the defaults, and in general optimize the UI not for making settings changes quick for those that do this all the time (like, nobody?) and rather focus on making them clear for those people trying to change something they rare change and aren't quite sure what they're doing.
Yes but the decision to redesign something might be towards people who haven't figured it out, which if they are a large enough fraction might be worth the tradeoff.
(there are other reasons too of course, sometimes not really good ones)
