USER CUSTOMIZATION

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Illustration

In the private settings in Microsoft Pocket PC the user can customize the system to best fit her needs.

Context

…you want to design your mobile application to flexibly adapt to the users needs and behavior - FLEXIBILITY.

Now you want to let users customize their applications themselves.

Problem statement

How do you make a small screen display as useful as possible to the user?

Problem description with forces

A small screen makes it difficult to display lots of information. Splitting information, however, requires users to navigate through many different windows to find what they want.

As pocket computers typically live in just one person's pocket, why not let the user individualize the system by telling the application what information is really important and what is not?

Although this might be additional effort for the user, this effort has to be inputted only once and should increase efficiency from then onwards.

Examples

In Microsoft Pocket PC different options can be customized.

In the private settings items such as the "Today"-screen, hardware keys, menus or sounds can be individualized by the user.

In Palm OS the options that appear on the screen depend on the user's settings.

For example, the ToDo list has options for sort order, whether to show completed items and whether to show categories.

These categories are controlled by a separate preferences dialog. When restarting a Palm application that uses Categories the category the user was last in is displayed.

Solution

Therefore:

Let users customize and adapt the application!

In doing so, you can tailor your display to show the information that will most likely appeal to the current user.

However, personalizing an application is an additional effort for the user. For that reason, only provide user customization or individualization if there is an obvious added value for users. This added value might be:

• An increase in efficiency in long-term and frequent use
• A reduction of complexity in huge quantities of content

There are two main rules for this pattern: the default setting should display all the information users require, and it should be easy for users to reset the software to a sensible state!

Diagram

References

How user can organize their data is described in CATEGORIES.

Notes

This pattern was adopted from Charles Weir and James Noble [1]. It was modified to be adapted to the structure and format of this pattern language and supplemented where necessary.

Literature and Links

1. Weir, C. and Noble, J. (2001): A window in your pocket - Some small patterns for user interfaces. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Pattern Languages of Program Design, EuroPloP 2001. The Hillside Group, Inc.