Customisable Websites: Things to Remember

published by Dan in Usability | Website Design with No Comments

Customisable websites can be really cool but you should remember to address possible usability problems that may arise from making your site customisable. Here are a few things you should remember when designing a customisable site.

• The most important thing you shouldn’t overlook is to provide an easy way to reset the site’s configuration. Customisable websites are fun to play around with, especially when there are new features or a user is new to the site. Unfortunately this also means that users are likely to do something that they do not really like to keep while they explore your site’s capabilities. A reset button is the easiest way to go back to the original format/content without having to undo everything they did step by step.
• If you want users to be able to add/remove content make sure that adding applications is easy. If something has to be installed to make an app work make sure that installation would be really easy. If possible users should not have to bother installing anything and should be able to simply add/remove content with one or two clicks.
• If you want to allow users to change the layout of the web page it would be a good idea to follow iGoogle’s example and make it easy by letting it be done simply by clicking and dragging the content around. The problem with this is that users sometimes drag the content around without meaning to, messing up the page layout. To prevent this give users the option to lock the page’s layout after they have tweaked it to their satisfaction.

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