A customizable interface is an interface that gives the user partial or total control over one or several of its properties. If my sporadic observations are anything to go by, a growing number of people involved in building user interfaces resort to customizability as a sure-fire way to empower users and give them more control over their workflows. After all, the heterogeneity of user expectations renders the challenge of designing universal interfaces unsurmountable, or so they say.

Customizability in the Wild

For years, Microsoft Word has allowed users to customize the default toolbar under the assumption that this would help them tailor the interface to fit their needs. Users can literally spend hours exploring hundreds of buttons and thousands of combination to choose from.

Similarly, Mac OS 10.0 has introduced customizable toolbars in some of its flagship applications, where icons can be selectively displayed, rearranged, or completely discarded in favor of text-only labels.

Other notable software vendors such as Macromedia and Adobe have long promoted their highly customizable user interfaces, influencing legions of third party developers in the process.

Over the years, customizability has become a de facto standard in modern application design.

The Pitfall

Since the dawn of graphical user interfaces, academics have thoroughly studied subjectivity and efficiency in interface design (Tullis, 1984). Most findings boil down to the following conclusion: interfaces that accommodate subjectivity do not maximize efficiency.

At first, it may sound incongruous to some. Yet, a closer examination of such interfaces would painlessly reveal their fairly obvious pitfalls:

• Most users are not aware of what works best for them. Their personalization choices are more often than not based on tastes and vague assumptions.
• Learning the customization features and exploring all the possibilities before making a choice will most likely distract users from the task at hand.
• Customizable interfaces add an extra layer of complexity that may turn off less experienced users. For instance, complaints of ‘disappearing’ toolbar buttons are not hard to come by in less computer-savvy circles.
• The efficiency of customizable interfaces may be difficult to assess using quantitative methods.

It would be hard to argue that in some particular circumstances, giving users control over some elements of the interface is inevitable. That being said, customization should be kept at its bare minimum regardless of the situation; it is up to interface designers to figure out what would work best for most users (80%) to carry out any given task within the scope of the application. A highly customizable interface is a clear symptom that the designer haven’t conducted enough research to understand the way users would interact with it.

Customizability and Distraction

A relevant and timely example would be distraction-free writing environments on Mac OSX. Using minimalistic, barely customizable interfaces, this niche category of applications tries to address the problem of feature creep that most modern word processing solutions suffer from. Ironically, most of these applications disregard the fact that even the slightest level of customization can undermine the distraction-free argument underlying their positioning. Distraction slowly creeps in when users are given the ability to customize fonts, colors and backgrounds.

One notable contender, the recently released iA Writer for Mac, trod the path of zero customizability in a move that would seem bold to developers and users alike. Unsurprisingly, it takes only a couple of minutes on iA Writer to realize that the lack of customization is nowhere near detrimental to efficiency. From typography to colors, everything has been taken care of for users, allowing them to fully concentrate on the task at hand: writing.

Closing Thoughts

The one-size-fits-all approach could be effortlessly dismissed as inappropriate for more complex interfaces, such as graphic editors and office suites. Their highly customizable interfaces are built on the premise that users have esoteric expectations and disparate workflows, which might actually be the case for some of these applications. But then, the real problem lies few layers deeper: what is the point of making feature-bloated octopus applications to start with? And how in earth would adding heaps of customization settings would make their interfaces more usable anyway?