In The Power of Defaults Jeff Atwood nicks the title of an old Jakob Nielson post and weaves in some ideas of his own.

“For most users, the default value is the only value. Your choice of default values will have a profound impact on how your application is used.”

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on Jeff’s site recently. He should probably be in your list of RSS feeds (if you’ve got one – and why on earth wouldn’t you? You not still browsing the web like we did in the old days are you?)

P.S. The observant reader will notice that I didn’t actually quote Jeff quoting Jakob but why waste a snappy title.