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Customization Kills
Kills good design, anyway. I was reminded by the Bad Usability calendar (something you should check out, by the way) of a maxim I read from Jakob Nielsen that said "customization is not a silver bullet." He touched on a similar subject in an article on personalization vs. customization. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's spot on here, and this is why.
It's lazy
Customization is the lazy way out. Even here at ZURB we occasionally come to an impass on whether a feature should be implemented, or an interaction should work one way or another and we're tempted to just say 'well, we'll make it a preference.' Don't give in to the temptation to push your design problems onto the user – figure out what's best and go with that.
Users don't know
Toss in a Julian or Gregorian toggle and we're good to go!
Most users are not designers. There's a reason we get paid to make these kinds of decisions, and it's because they don't always have easy or obvious answers. The Bad Usability calendar uses a case where a user is asked to pick the date display format from a select list of...well they only show seven options but it's easy to imagine showing another 10, or 20, or who knows how many. One of those options is, in all likelihood, the most readable and intuitive for the largest possible group of people. Pick that. Figure out which one that is through user testing or research, and pick it for them. If one is a convention in America and another in Europe, design accordingly.
That's a fairly simple example, but the principle is sound. Customization is all well and good, and in fact in some cases it makes for a great experience (or at least a compelling one). But it's not a silver bullet, a catch-all for design problems – it's a tool we can use well or poorly.
Have any examples of customization (or personalization, to avoid a semantic dispute with Nielsen) we should see? Good or bad. Put them in the comments so we can check them out!
43 comments
Steve says
MySpace is a great example of giving users the power to customize profiles (makes the profile owner happy) but I can't tell you how many ridiculous profiles I have seen. Pages so long it takes forever to scroll, animated background images, multiple audio players. Feels like a huge step backwards in web design.
I also saw this the other day: http://www.roxer.com/ The editor is great, it is like a web-based version of iWeb. But check out the sites people are making with it. Sometimes everyone shouldn't be given total control over design.
I use Netvibes as my start page and I think it has the perfect balance of customization and usability for typical end-users.
Jonathan (ZURB) says
@Steve
Woo boy, there's some...special pages on Roxer. And you're absolutely right, I had MySpace in the back of my mind the whole time I wrote this post.
The perfect example of the two paradigms is MySpace vs Facebook (at least before all the zombie-poking nonsense). One went for total control, the other for none whatsoever...and that's why I can be found on Facebook, not MySpace.
Brenton says
Why does the Bad Usability Calendar page have SO MANY BUTTONS?! It's utterly self-reflexive, though I'm not sure it was intended to be so.
Jonathan (ZURB) says
@Brenton Fair point – maybe they were being ironic? Or maybe if you spend too long looking at bad usability you succumb to it yourself...let's all hope not.
Jeremy (ZURB) says
I don't buy the blanket statement "customization kills." To the degree that it's done poorly, you can say it contributes to a slow death (too many interactions like that calendar menu and the interface gets noisy). Point taken, but there's more to it than this and you hint at it right here:
Figure out which one that is through user testing or research, and pick it for them. If one is a convention in America and another in Europe, design accordingly."
That reminds me of the "Ketchup Conundrum" by Malcolm Gladwell from a few years back (though not as far back as your Jakob reference). You recognize two experiences that deserve two different design considerations. This is similar to what Gladwell calls "the plural nature of perfection" when discussing the insights product designer Howard Moskowitz brought to Pepsi in the seventies:
He made up experimental batches of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness—8 per cent, 8.25 per cent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12—gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a mess—there wasn't a pattern—and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have been looking for the perfect Diet Pepsis."
There's a lesson here for interaction design. Ideally the best solution is one-size-fits-all because that's easier to get to market and lighter to maintain.
However, there may be an even bigger cost to assuming there is only one perfect interaction, and not perfect *interactions* (plural).
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