[IxDA Discuss] Thoughts on skinning/customizing enterprise apps?

[E. Miller]

Hi all,  

Just as a quick side note on this -- we recently worked on a large
application UI project where the preliminary specs called for
user-configurable display elements like window skins, text size,
fonts...which became a problem, when I saw that end users were doing things
like red-on-fuschia 20pt Comic Sans MS on an 1280 x 1024 LCD monitor running
at 800 x 600.  (extreme example, but stuff like that was happening)

So we defined a very limited subset of customizable/skinnable attributes.
Tahoma is OK, Verdana isn't.  A limited bumping up on the font size is OK as
long as you have your monitor set at the optimal resolution and the window
can scale.  No custom cursors.  We documented this with rationales on
consistency and usability.

So maybe not fully skin-able interfaces unless it's an MP3 player or
something, but otherwise let people have fun personalizing the UI through
treatments that don't adversely affect usability?

Eric

> Providing "skins" for the sake of providing the user with the
> opportunity to custom design the look-and-feel is probably a really bad
> idea in the context of office automation, enterprise applications, etc.
> Certainly it is one of ::the:: features of consumer focused apps.

...

> I ask because I am against doing things "just because we can",
> and there are many issues to consider - breaking branding and
> identity, support concerns, etc.
> 
> If the customization options are trivial (e.g allow users to change
> the color of window title bars) it would lessen the concerns, but
> then how beneficial is it really to users?  Is it just another
> "hey you can also do this" (when in reality they probably never
> will or don't really care).