Summary

One of the virtues of the World Wide Web is its ability to facilitate customization. Web technology allows organizations to move beyond one-size-fits-all interfaces and products — allowing users to define and design their own experiences. Custom homepages and Web-based design-it-yourself processes are numerous and users appreciate the concept of customized experiences.

However, while the Web easily enables customization, and many organizations take advantage of that capability, the results are lackluster. In a recent usability study including both sites with and without customization functionality:

• Task completion on product customization sites was 17% lower than on non-customization sites
• 51% of product customization task completions were achieved only after experiencing moderate to major difficulty
• On interface customization sites, users felt more lost (by 9%) and more out of control (by 8%) than on non-customization sites

This report addresses:

• Usability of Interface Customization websites (e.g., custom homepages)
• Usability of Product Customization websites (e.g., custom stationery)
• Guidelines for improved customization task success and user satisfaction

This report is based on empirical observations of actual user behavior interacting with customization features. We observed 24 users conducting tasks on both interface and product customization websites.

This work contrasts with most other advice on customization, which is based on asking people what they like, as opposed to watching them while they're online. What people say and what they do often differ dramatically.

The report contains 46 guidelines for improving the design of customized web experiences:

> See sample page spreads as thumbnails
> Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox summarizing the report

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
2. Customization vs. Personalization
3. User Research
   • Business Benefits of Customization
   • Reduced Usability Issues On Customization Sites
   • Retain Good Defaults
   • Customization Can Be Effective When Implemented Correctly
4. Research Overview
   • Introduction
   • Purpose of Study
   • General Procedure
   • Websites Studied
5. Task Success, Difficulty and User Ratings
   • Lower Task Success On Product Customization Websites
   • It Is Difficult to Add Content and Tools On Interface Customization Sites
   • Low Findability and Poor Page Design Plague Customization Websites
   • Users Experience Higher Levels of Difficulty on Product Customization Sites
   • Users Have Trouble Adding Content and Moving Page Elements On Custom Homepages
   • Users Feel More Lost and Out of Control on Sites Featuring
   • Customization
6. Interface Customization
   • Level of Customization and Number of Choices Impact Usability
   • Designing For User Intentions
   • Biggest Issues With Interface Customization
   • Design Guidelines
7. Product Customization
   • Task Design Must be Driven By the Users' Mental Model
   • Two Product Customization Types
   • Biggest Issues With Product Customization
   • Design Guidelines
8. Methodology
   • Participants
   • Website Selection
   • Website Order
   • Websites and Tasks
   • Survey Questionnaire
9. List of Guidelines

What You Get

• Checklist of 46 specific design recommendations: Review your online customization process for these 46 items, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your design against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don't do anything wrong.
• Description of how users behave when using a variety of customization features, including extensive quotes. Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the sites we tested.
• The differentiating factors that caused site visitors to successfully or unsuccessfully complete tasks.
• 78 color screenshots with descriptions of why they worked well or caused problems in usability testing.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Adding customization features to an existing site
• Selling a customized product via the Web
• Building or managing a customized web-based service

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future. Remember that we don't get any grants or outside support for our independent research, so we depend on your honesty in buying the report to generate the funding for further work.

Download Report (from eSellerate) $64 for the PDF file with a single-user license (93 pages) $128 for site license to make copies