Right now, it's generally hard to always know what the default volume should be and I consider that a failure. One day tech will be sufficiently advanced that it can adapt to the environment and user and consistently pick an excellent default volume.
We're improving though. Volume settings are an unnecessary annoyance in a great deal of apps already and you won't need to tweak it in many apps that pick good standard defaults for notification sounds, mic volume, etc. It's grating when apps pick bad default volumes and it immediately assaults our ears. Unfortunately, users sometimes still have to tweak a global/system volume setting, but hey, things aren't perfect and it's good to have a fallback when software fails.
Two people may indeed have different preferences, but that's no excuse to force users to configure a bunch of knobs and switches themselves. Good design adapts to the user. When it doesn't, then settings cleans up after the failure.
>One day tech will be sufficiently advanced that it can adapt to the environment and user and consistently pick an excellent default volume.
This is sadly true, but I really wish it wasn't. There's no way to automatically determine the correct volume without privacy violating brain scanning.
We're improving though. Volume settings are an unnecessary annoyance in a great deal of apps already and you won't need to tweak it in many apps that pick good standard defaults for notification sounds, mic volume, etc. It's grating when apps pick bad default volumes and it immediately assaults our ears. Unfortunately, users sometimes still have to tweak a global/system volume setting, but hey, things aren't perfect and it's good to have a fallback when software fails.
Two people may indeed have different preferences, but that's no excuse to force users to configure a bunch of knobs and switches themselves. Good design adapts to the user. When it doesn't, then settings cleans up after the failure.