Customization Features Done Correctly for the Right Reasons

Web technology allows organizations to move beyond one-size-fits-all interfaces and products — allowing users to define and design their own experiences. Users appreciate custom homepages and web-based design-it-yourself processes. However, our research shows that users often encounter severe usability issues when trying to accomplish customization activities.

This 93-page report offers 46 design guidelines based on our usability research. Discussions and 78 screenshot illustrations supplement our findings.

The report does not cover personalization — where a software system tries to predict individual users' needs automatically. It is solely about designs where users themselves employ features to manually customize or configure the UI or a product.

Topics covered

• Overview
  • Business benefits of customization
  • Customization vs. personalization
  • Customization can be effective when implemented correctly
  • The importance of good defaults
• Usability findings
  • Users have difficultly to adding content and tools on interface customization sites
  • People experience high levels of difficulty on product customization sites
  • Users have trouble adding content and moving page elements on custom homepages
  • People feel lost and out of control on sites featuring customization
• Design guidelines for customizing the interface
  • Level of customization and number of choices
  • Designing for user intentions
  • Directing users to the customization path
  • Familiarizing users with new concepts
  • Educating people of advanced options
  • Illustrating usefulness of options and features
  • Browsing and search for content and tools
  • Providing feedback
  • Shared and private pages
• Design guidelines for customizing products
  • Users' mental model, how users think about product configuration
  • Workflow, structure, layout, sequence of choices
  • Initiating the process, process navigation
  • Communicating the scope of options
  • Save and apply data
  • How to avoid error messaging
  • In-line help and definitions
  • Comparing options and attributes
  • Review and approve features
• Detailed methodology section that shows how you can conduct your own usability studies

Research Method

The information in this report is based on one-on-one usability studies.

Representative users tested customization features on 7 websites. Users also tested websites with no customization to allow us to compare the user experience among different approaches.