I removed the Simplified Chinese toggle.
I removed Light Mode.
Then I finally added the bold Noto font I’d been wanting for a year.

It’s been a few days. Nobody’s complained.

The Simplified Chinese toggle and the problem with more choices

The Simplified Chinese toggle used to feel important to me.

I grew up reading and writing Simplified Chinese. I taught myself Traditional Chinese later through martial arts novels, Giddens Ko, and keeping a diary in Traditional characters. I don’t have the same resistance to Simplified Chinese that many people raised in Taiwan do.

So from day one of this blog, I built a Simplified/Traditional toggle using opencc. I wanted to make things as easy as possible for Simplified Chinese readers passing through.

But the toggle brought me endless headaches.

It meant extra space at the top of the site for the button. It meant that every time I wanted to try a new Chinese font, I had to load both the Simplified and Traditional versions.

Want to try Google’s Noto Sans? Load both SC and TC.

Every option adds another layer of hassle.

After nearly a year of wearing the same Uniqlo uniform, the lesson was clear: when there’s only one choice, there’s no choice at all. And when there’s no choice, you can focus on what actually matters.

You don’t need to offer the best choice. One good choice is enough.

Most of the time, I want to please everyone. Give them the best, most customizable experience. In MARU Kana Trainer, I offered over 10 options for customizing kana practice. Some users loved it, but most didn’t even know those options existed. The extra choices just left them confused about what to do.

The writers I admire, like Derek Sivers, have their own personality. They don’t say “you could try this, or maybe that.” They say: do this, because I know it’s best.

More options, worse experience.

e89295’s vertical text

This reminds me of e89295’s website.

Vertical text, right to left, absolutely beautiful, but genuinely hard to read. I visited several times but the layout always turned me away. It wasn’t until I needed to read his long submission for “Ideal Daily Life” that I finally subscribed to his RSS and read his posts in a reader.

I told him about this. He wrote back saying that modern browsers all have reading mode. One click and it switches to horizontal. He was almost proud when he told me someone had written to say they envied his ability to “use vertical text without burden,” while they themselves “didn’t dare keep only one layout.”

So he still wasn’t going to add a horizontal toggle.

Stubborn. Cool.

The best user experience

I can’t go that far. I think user experience is the most important thing.

But I eventually realized something:

Offering the one option you believe is best is itself the best user experience.

A good restaurant doesn’t hand you a 200-page menu. A good coach doesn’t say “you could do this, or maybe that.” They say: do this.

In Japanese, omakase literally means “I’ll leave it to you.” You trust the chef, so you hand over every choice.

I want to build an omakase blog.

Being an opinionated creator isn’t sacrificing user experience. It’s using your taste and judgment to make the hardest choice for your readers.

So I removed the Simplified Chinese toggle, removed Light Mode, and added bold Noto.

One fewer option, one more degree of personality. That’s the kind of blog I want to build.