Personalization and Configuration

User interface designers often face the conundrum of whether to make their products user-customizable. It is easy to be torn between the user's need to have things done his way, and the clear problem this creates when the program's navigation suffers due to familiar elements being moved or hidden. The solution is to cast the problem in a different light.

People like to change things around to suit themselves. Even beginners, not to mention perpetual intermediates, like to put their own personal stamps on a program, changing it so that it looks or acts the way they prefer, uniquely suiting their tastes. People will do this for the same reason they fill their identical cubicles with pictures of their spouses and kids, plants, favorite paintings, quotes, and Dilbert cartoons.

Decorating the persistent objects—the walls—gives them individuality without removing them. It also allows you to recognize a hallway as being different from dozens of identical hallways because it is the one with the M. C. Escher poster hanging in it. The term personalization describes the decoration of persistent objects.

Personalization makes the places in which we work more likable and familiar. It makes them more human and pleasant to be in. The same is true of software, and giving the user the ability to decorate his personal program is both fun and useful as a navigational aide.

On the other hand, moving persistent objects themselves can hamper navigation. If the facilities people come into your office over the weekend and rearrange all the cubicles, Dilbert cartoons notwithstanding, finding your office again on Monday morning will be tough (persistent objects and their importance to navigation is discussed in Chapter 11).

Is this an apparent contradiction? Not really. Adding decoration to persistent objects helps navigation, whereas moving the persistent objects hinders navigation. The term configuration describes moving, adding, or deleting persistent objects.

Configuration is desirable for more experienced users. Perpetual intermediates, after they have established a working set of functions, will want to configure the interface to make those functions easier to find and use. They will also want to tune the program itself for speed and ease, but in all cases, the level of custom configuration will be light to moderate.

Configuration is a necessity for expert users. They are already beyond the need for more traditional navigation aids because they are so familiar with the product. Experts may use the program for several hours every day; in fact, it may be the main application for accomplishing the bulk of their jobs.

Moving controls around on the toolbar is a form of personalization. However, the three leftmost toolbar controls on many programs, which correspond to File New, File Open, and File Save, are now so common that they can be considered persistent objects. A user who moves these around is configuring his program as much as he is personalizing it. Thus, there is a gray boundary between configuration and personalization.

Changing the color of objects on the screen is clearly a personalization task. Windows has always been very accommodating in this respect, allowing users to independently change the color of each component of the windows interface, including the color and pattern of the desktop itself. Windows gives users a practical ability to change the system font, too. Personalization is idiosyncratically modal (see the next section); people either love it or they don't. You must accommodate both categories of users.

Tools for personalizing must be simple and easy to use, giving the user a visual preview of her selections. Above all, they must be easy to undo. A dialog box that lets users change colors should offer a function that returns everything to the factory settings.

Most end users won't squawk if they can't configure your program as long as it does its job well. Some really expert users may feel slighted, but they will still use and appreciate your program if it works the way they expect.

Corporate IT managers value configuration. It allows them to subtly coerce corporate users into practicing common methods. They appreciate the ability to add macros and commands to menus and toolbars that make the off-the-shelf software work more intimately with established company processes, tools, and standards. Many IT managers base their buying decisions on the configurability of programs. If they are buying ten or twenty thousand copies of a program, they rightly feel that they should be able to adapt it to their particular style of work. It is, thus, not on a whim that Microsoft Office applications are among the most configurable shrink-wrapped software titles available.